CHRISTINE MACHADO
The Forgotten Mother. Trapped Within A Locket. The Favour. These are hardly familiar stories. Yet you can read all these short stories and more on a fairly new online site, all of which are mainly written by aspiring Goan writers.
Started in February 2018, Novella has generated quite a buzz over a short period of time with over 100 short stories penned by around 60 budding authors.
“While most of these writers are Goans, we do have a few from states like West Bengal and Kerala and even one from the USA,” states Inacio Fernandes who launched this initiative.
And ardent reader himself, Fernandes earlier worked in a Mumbai based company and often passed his time enroute to his destination engrossed in reading. However owing to constantly having to switch between trains or rickshaws etc, the flow often got disturbed leaving him a bit frustrated. He then decided to shift over to short stories.
“It was then that the idea cropped up in my mind-’ why not created a platform where I can get an unlimited supply of short stories?’ At the same time the site could also serve as a platform for people like me who are working, who want to write but do not have a platform to do so,” says Fernandes. And thus Novella was born.
On Novella, amateur authors can send submit their stories to the team who do a quick editorial review. The writer gets feedback within a day and if it’s good enough it is published. Readers who visit the site can rate stories and also follow authors they like.
“We have gotten in touch with school and colleges and different literature groups with regards to writing stories. We also run contests to further encourage people to write,” says Fernandes.
Apart from their online site, the Novella team also conducts short story writing workshops where they guide aspiring writers on how to build a story-line, how to build characters how to ideate etc.
“Parents and teachers often encourage their students or their wards to read but seldom do we try to make them write and this is where we want to help,” says Fernandes. At these workshops, participants are also invited to come forward and read their stories be it in English, Hindi, Konkani or Marathi. “We have realised that there are plenty of budding writers with many stories out there. We’ve had even a ten year old come up with a good story. At one workshop we had a 70 year old attending,” says Fernandes.
Apart from this the Novella team is also planning on coming out with a quarterly digest where 15 of he best stories will be published as a book of short stories. “If a writer’s work is chosen for the book, he or she will get paid. We are looking at bringing out our first book towards the end of June and the aim is to take it pan-India,” says Fernandes, adding that they are also looking at expanding their operations to Mumbai soon and will be increasing their efforts at promoting their writers.
