Publications
Writing Journey
Somewhere between what was felt and what could not be said, writing began.
I do not remember a single moment when I decided to become a writer.
There was no grand beginning, no particular morning when I opened a blank page and knew that words would become a part of my life. Writing arrived more quietly than that. It lived in observations, unfinished thoughts, sentences written in margins, emotions that seemed too complicated to explain aloud.
Perhaps I was writing long before I knew I was.
At first, words were simply a way of keeping things. A feeling before it disappeared. A thought that returned at midnight. A moment that seemed ordinary until I looked at it long enough.
Poetry became a place where those fragments could remain.
And slowly, the page began to feel less like somewhere I wrote and more like somewhere I belonged.
Finding
My Voice
Learning that not every feeling needs to be explained.
The early years of writing were full of experimentation.
I wrote about emotions, seasons, memory, solitude, relationships, growing older, and all the small things that seemed to carry larger meanings. I tried different forms, different rhythms, different ways of saying what I could not always say directly.
Some pieces were simple. Some were strange. Some I understood only after I had finished writing them.
But each one taught me something about the kind of writer I wanted to become.
Over time, I found myself drawn towards metaphor, personification, imagery, and the quiet spaces between what is said and what is meant.
I began to realise that I did not always want to explain an emotion.
Sometimes, I wanted to let a tree carry it. A house. A season. An old object. A forgotten room. A shadow. A cup of tea left untouched.
That became an important part of my writing identity: allowing ordinary things to hold extraordinary feelings.
The First
Footprints
When private words began finding public pages.
Writing gradually moved beyond private pages.
I began participating in literary competitions and writing communities, where poems and stories were no longer meant only for me. They were read, judged, remembered, and sometimes recognised.
There were rankings I celebrated, pieces that surprised me, contests that challenged me, and moments when a poem I had quietly written found its way into someone else's reading.
Among these early milestones were recognitions through StoryMirror, including winning Author of the Month in 2022 and several placements across poetry and short-story contests.
There was also the designation of Literary General in StoryMirror's Army of Literary Warriors.
Each recognition mattered, but perhaps not simply because of the position attached to it.
They gave me something more useful.
Proof that the words I had been keeping to myself could travel beyond me.
From Poems to Pages
The next step was seeing my writing become part of something larger.
My poems began appearing in anthologies and literary collections, allowing individual pieces to exist alongside the work of other writers.
Among these were Sophrosyne, Tiny Little Tales, Silhouettes, Teary Void, Limerence, The Dusky Sunrise, and Blooming Orchids.
Later came publications through Paperoin Publications, including Sunsets and Blossoms, Beside Me Is a Co-Passenger, House of Rituals, The Myriad State, and Existence of Euphemisms.
My work also appeared in Magazine 404, the annual creative journal of the Department of Commerce at Lady Shri Ram College for Women.
And then came an especially meaningful milestone: Crack of Dawn becoming part of the international anthology Leaving Echoes: A Pathway into Poetry's Depths.
Each publication felt like another small footprint.
Not because a book had my name somewhere inside it, but because a piece that once existed only as an idea had acquired a physical home.
Learning to Let
the Work Be Seen
There is a particular vulnerability in being read.
There is a particular vulnerability in allowing other people to read something you have written.
A poem may take only a few minutes to read, but the person who wrote it knows everything that exists behind those few lines.
The hesitation. The rewriting. The sentence that refused to work. The image that suddenly appeared. The decision to keep one word and remove another.
Writing taught me that being a writer is not only about producing words.
It is also about learning to release them.
To let them become slightly separate from you.
To allow readers to find meanings you never consciously placed there.
That has perhaps been one of the quietest forms of growth in my journey.
Beyond The Rhyme
At some point, the writing needed a home of its own.
That home became Beyond The Rhyme.
It began as more than a name. It became a way of understanding what I wanted my writing to do.
I have never wanted poetry to exist only within rhyme or conventional structure.
For me, poetry can live in an image. In a pause. In a sentence that stays with you after the page has ended. In the space between two people who have stopped speaking. In an ordinary afternoon that suddenly feels worth remembering.
Beyond The Rhyme became a place for that kind of writing.
A place for poetry, reflections, short stories, fragments, and eventually, things created for other readers and writers too.
The Writer I Am Becoming
The journey has changed the way I write.
I have become more interested in what is left unsaid. In layered metaphors rather than immediate explanations. In giving an object a memory. In allowing a landscape to become a character.
In writing about growth without turning every piece into a lesson.
I still write about emotions, but I increasingly find myself interested in the objects and places that quietly witness them.
Perhaps that is why I keep returning to old houses, trees, letters, seasons, rooms, books, windows, photographs, and forgotten things.
They remember without speaking.
And writers, in many ways, do something similar.
We notice. We collect. We preserve.
Where the
Journey Stands
The journey is not finished. It simply has a new page.
Today, the journey exists in many forms.
There are poems published in anthologies. Stories that began as competition entries. Pieces written simply because an idea would not leave.
A growing archive of work.
A literary space called Beyond The Rhyme.
And now, things made for other people to write with, read, keep, and return to.
The journey is no longer only about becoming a writer.
It is about continuing to be one.
There are still blank pages. Still unfinished poems. Still ideas that arrive at inconvenient hours. Still sentences that take days to become what they were trying to become.
And perhaps that is the part I like most.
There is no final version of a writing journey.
There is only the next page.
Still Writing
I am still writing.
Still collecting fragments. Still learning how much a few words can hold. Still looking for stories in things that appear ordinary. Still finding my way through the quiet spaces between thought and language.
And somewhere along the way, the page stopped asking me where I was going.
It simply became the place I kept returning to.
Khushi Kaul
Poet & Writer · Beyond The Rhyme
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