About this page

The Magnolia
2 min readAug 16, 2021

In this page, I sketch scenes/shots of a novel that I have been thinking about for the past ten years. It is a magic real tale of a woman who has to face her past, mourn it and reconcile with it. Along the journey she almost loses her sanity, as her childhood house casts a spell on her. Genre-wise it dwells on the unlikely alliance of Herta Muller’s “Land of Green Palms” come together with Isabel Allende’s “House of Spirits.” The novel has a linear plot. However, it is told from multiple POVs, in a series of interrupted short narratives inspired by Muller. The protagonist’s life has been disrupted too many times and as such her story embodies this scattering condition of life.

Plot Development Updates

They say there are two types of writers. Architects and gardeners. Abstract thinkers and intuitive actors if you like. I’m the latter. So I pinch and twist the plot, tie and undo its knots as I write here. I aim to share this process of gardening with you, of cultivating the life of the novel without treating the plot mechanistically while acknowledging that blueprints are all we have for imagining life. You can follow these plot twists under posts titled “Plot Development.” They are numbered too.

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The Magnolia

Published author. Creative writer. Historian. Lover of sand, sun, and water. I write to take care of myself.