Writer’s Journal: The Story That Waited for Me | VB Bonny
I finished a story today.
And strangely, I don't want to tell you what happens in it.
Not because it has some extraordinary twist I am protecting, or because I am trying to create suspense around my work.
I simply feel that telling you the story would reveal something that belongs to the character.
She has been with me since 2022.
This is one of those entries from my writer’s journal that I almost didn't know how to write. Back then, I had prompts. Lots of images. Imaginations that stayed in the footnotes.
A woman. She stayed, crossed many years. I never dared to write her down.
I always tried to begin her story more than once.
I couldn't.
I thought perhaps I hadn't grown enough as a woman to understand how deeply she felt.
Now I think I know what was missing. I learned why I never erased that footnote. Her story never left the corner of my table.
Writer’s Journal: I could fabricate things.
I could invent conflicts, create dramatic turns, add chapters, make people fall in love, break them apart, bring them back together.
I could make a story happen.
I should have done that. It would always have been the easy way out.
But with this woman, I didn't want to fabricate anything. I couldn't write in metaphors, with fancy literature overshadowing her elegance.
She pursed her lips.
Bonny, stop this...
Bonny, I won't forgive you.
She kept arguing with me.
I closed my laptop and wrote on my iPad.
She isn't a soft woman. Her eyes kept staring at me.
Bonny, you won't write that.
The emotions that appeared too polished. A beauty that she never chased.
She waited four years.
She kept calling me childish.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, she was hesitant after what she had gone through in her life. A life that demanded too much from her, and she never argued.
And that's how four years passed.
Today, I thought about bringing her onto the page. I felt that something was still incomplete.
I should stop running from a part of me that kept saying I would pen her journey later.
Today, while writing her, something changed in me.
She held my hands.
I joined her journey into the 1960s.
The village. The ghoonghat. And the grip she had on me.
She guided me towards her desires, her needs, and her way of holding back emotions for so long.
You waited for me. And somehow, in my imagination, she kept looking back at me as if she were saying: Are you following? I waited until you grew into the woman who could understand me.
That realization hit me harder than the story itself.
Because perhaps writers don't always outgrow their unfinished stories.
Sometimes we grow towards them.
Bonny learned what it meant to step into the shoes of a woman who had seen too much.
She kept dolling her up, though she knew no one was going to lift her ghoonghat.
I finished the first draft today.
I won't tell you what happens.
Not yet.
Some stories deserve to remain private for a little while after they finally leave your head—before they become an edited draft, before they find their way onto a bookshelf.
For now, I am just relieved to know that she is no longer abandoned.
She is alive in my draft.
VB Bonny
Indian Romantic Thriller Author
