[Sand, Shoreline, Ship]

Prior to this session I was expecting Mukul Deva to share his journey as an entrepreneur however he focused more on his career as a writer, more specifically taught us the procedure as to how to write a story. He mentioned that there were 2 parts when doing this, one is the science as in ‘what is my story going to be about?’ and another that I hadn’t really considered before was ‘how am I going to do this?’. I found it very intriguing that writing the story itself doesn’t take as much time if you have a solid story outline and you’ve done your research correctly. However the researching process takes a significant amount of time and I’ve never realised how there are so many factors you need to consider. For example the kind of clothes your characters are wearing, does it reflect the kind of environment they are living in?, as well as the weather, what kind of condition is the scene being written upon. One important thing Mukul mentioned was if you were to have a character that gets involved in multiple countries, the difference in timezones is something you need to consider in order for the story to make sense. After taking that all in, I’ve realised that mystery is one of the hardest genres to write in which I found very contradicting because I had always been watching Sherlock Holmes and thought how simple it must be to create these episodes as every ‘incident’ is made up so the author could easily just slip in lots of things to overall make the story flow. However I was proven in this session that there’s much more to that and research being something significantly important. I’ve acknowledged the challenges writers may face and this session has taught me to to be patient, encouraged me to continue to stay resilient. As I’ve been frustrated as to how it took 2 weeks to write up my GPERS essay as a lot of planning had to be involved, if we look at this at a larger scale, it takes months of research and possibly years to finish writing a book, and I’ve thought about how much time and effort has been put into a writers piece of work. I think two important ideas I’ve been able to take away from this session was similar to the previous sessions guest speaker Danny Raven Tan, one was the idea of to ‘just do it’, the other being able to stay resilient. I think it’s important to do something if you want to do it, yet at the same time keeping in mind that the journey may take some time. However once you get through it, you will feel very proud of what you’ve accomplished and see the growth you’ve shown.