HOW i found my voice as an author of "memory stains on banarasi dupatta" | ANTRA DUBEY

I am still not used to being called an author. However, I would prefer not waking up from the dream, at least not for now. Finding my voice as an author was not a sudden discovery. It was more like peeling layers of my own self until I reached the rawest truth.

In the beginning, I wrote the way I thought writers were “supposed” to write. Flowery words, complicated phrases, and the need to impress were all there. It looked fine. It read fine. Yet if you had asked me, “Does this sound like you?” my answer would have been no. It felt like wearing someone else’s shoes which is pretty, but not my fit.

The shift came when I stopped worrying about sounding clever and started chasing what felt true. That is when my words stopped pretending. I let my characters talk like real people , sometimes awkward, sometimes abrupt, sometimes accidentally poetic. I let the pauses between words carry as much meaning as the words themselves. And I stopped explaining everything, because I trusted YOU, "the reader", to fill in the pauses. It wasn’t the loudest voice or the most polished, but it was mine. And when readers told me they could “hear” me in the story, I knew I had finally done it, written in a way that felt like I was talking to a friend over a chai , without the need to pretend or perform. The more I wrote from that place of truth, the more my story began to breathe on its own. 

Thats the thing about finding your voice, its not about inventing something new. It’s about stripping away everything you think you should sound like, until you land on what you do sound like. For me, that meant letting myself write the way I breathe, naturally, without effort, without trying to be anyone else. And thats the voice that told Memory Stains on Banarasi Dupatta, the one I plan to carry into every story from here on.