One Good Kid: The Power Of A Teen's Imagination


by Ketaki Shriram-8975 - Date: 2008-08-13 - Word Count: 581 Share This!

This new century is not kind to teenagers. Increasingly exposed to adult themes, living in a world of melting icecaps and crumbling economic dreams, they still must deal with all the classic adolescent angst. Will I be liked? Will I be loved? Who am I?

Every day, it seems, we see stories of teens self-destructing: falling victim to bullying, acting out in violent ways, desperate for love, escaping through drugs, living in private iPod worlds. And then there's Ketaki Shriram, novelist.

At 16, while caught up in preparing for her senior year in high school and readying her college applications, Ketaki has also managed to publish the fantasy novel she wrote at 13, Sorceress of the Himalayas (Crystallius Press, $17.95).

"Through writing, I have been able to grow as a human being and understand the depth of certain emotions in a more complex manner," she says. "The more I wrote, the more I learned about myself and my world view."

As parents of adolescents know all too well, one of the most difficult things for a teenager to do is to take a long-range view. Teens live in the "now"-deeply feeling the pressures and slights of today and deeply unconvinced that tomorrow can be different. Learning perspective and patience are the keys to maturity.

While Sorceress of the Himalayas has a youthful heroine, the maturity of the storyline comes from just such a perspective. The central character has to deal with such issues as discrimination, bullying, abandonment, lost love and even death, but they aren't the focus of the plot. The heroine rises above them on her quest to save the world and those she loves.

"I have been inspired to write by people and events that have happened around me as I have grown up," Ketaki says. "Writing Sorceress was not only a way for me to teach others to look beyond their daily lives, but also a way for me to teach myself."

Channeling her energies into writing started early. A good student, Ketaki has always enjoyed reading and writing, and completed her first short story, for a local book fair, when she was 8. She finished her first long-form fiction, a fantasy tale, at the age of 10, discovering a passion for fantasy in the process.

While Ketaki has the classic "good kid" profile - student body president, opinion editor on the school paper - she's also a typical teen, confessing "I became (and still remain) involved with my story to the point where I sometimes end up thinking about the characters or setting during a math or chemistry test!"

"What I often found was that the events occurring at a given point in time in my life would influence the kinds of scenes I wrote in the novel, and the way it progressed. This allowed a variety of emotions to seep into my book, sometimes subconsciously inserted as I wrote," she says.

Both the book and its characters are remarkably unselfconscious. Set in Asia in the 1800s, the book is free of both modern pressures and teen angst; the heroine is too busy dealing with an important quest to do more than notice the obstacles of peer pressure and discrimination that sidetrack many teens.

Keeping busy while looking forward is what's driving Ketaki Shriram these days. "I am currently a junior in high school, which means that I don't have much time to write anymore! When I do get the chance, however, I continue to experiment with different plots, characters, and even different universes in my writing."

Related Tags: business, meditation, death, imagination, teenager, heroine, discrimination, adolescents, bullying, lost love, abandonment, new book, ketaki shriram, contemporary fiction, sorceress of the himalayas, crystallius press, teen angst, teen writer, teen read

Ketaki Shriram has been crafting compelling stories from the tender age of eight, when she completed her first short story for a local book fair. Over the next few years her love of writing grew so intense that by age 10 she had completed her first long form fictional story. By 13 she had completed her first novel, Sorceress of the Himalayas (Crystallius Press, $17.95), which she is now publishing at age 16. When she is not writing, Ketaki, an outstanding student, is highly active in her high school's student government (as student body president) and is opinion editor on her school newspaper. She is currently working on her next novel. www.sorceressofthehimalayas.com

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