If you are using a desktop to read this blog, you can see a link to my book on the right. It took me about a year to write the book. During this period I wasn’t just writing the book, but also my previous blog – The Mangoville Chronicles. I used to divide my time between the two, not based on any particular rule, but based on what sort of mood I was in. What I realised after finishing the book was that the process is both incredibly easy and incredibly difficult, especially if you are writing fiction.

There are probably millions of writers in the world, past and present. I don’t know how many started writing with the intention of writing a book. Probably most did. I didn’t. I didn’t have a long story to tell. I didn’t have any story to tell. But inside me there was this urge to create a world and characters. It is because of this urge that I created The Mangoville Chronicles and its inhabitants. Why then did I choose to create another one? Mangoville is a comic world. Its inhabitants and plots are outrageous. Writing comedy with the intention of writing comedy is not easy. And the thing about writing in a comic world is that you cannot become serious. But in a serious world you can get comic relief. Kalpavriksham – the setting of the book, is also a fictional world like Mangoville, but it is an ordinary world with ordinary people. This world also has its funny moments, but they occur during the natural course of everyday life. Writing in such a world is easier and the story building feels more organic, unlike the episodic nature of Mangoville.

I will confess, I didn’t have a plot in mind when I started writing the book. I had vague characters in mind. The lead would be an underachieving person or a person in some kind of distress. There would be a cop. There had to be a cop. I have watched so many crime dramas and read so many murder mysteries, I cannot think of a story without a cop. There had to be strong women characters, because in my life there are strong women characters. They are everywhere in the world and need to be represented in books. I wanted the characters in my book to have strong opinions. Strong opinions lead to dialogue and I like dialogues in books. Too much narration bogs me down as a reader, and it’s not something I wanted my reader to go through. In hindsight, the stories of Kalpavriksham can easily be adapted for theatre, especially the ‘The Missing Prime Minister’ because they are very conversational.

With these thoughts in mind, I began writing. The story starts unfolding as you write. Therefore it is very important to write. You may write garbage, but if you wish to write a book, you must sit down and write every day. You have to treat it like a project, if not a job, and move it a little towards completion every day. On some days you will realise that the story has not made any progress. Or that your writing is inferior to the previous days. That is absolutely fine. This is where my experience of writing a funny blog helped. My blog has a comics section and comics need to have punchlines (most of the time, if not always). Sometimes you just can’t think of one. It is excruciating. You feel like abandoning the comic. For the sake of one great last frame, you are ready to burn the entire comic. But then better sense prevails and you think of small changes to the parts you considered sacrosanct. Suddenly all the pieces fall together. You not only have a punchline, but you have a better one than you were hoping for. You pat yourself on the back. This experience of coming unstuck from my blogging days helped me tremendously while writing the book.

As the page count grew, so did the realisation that I did not really have an epic story in me. At least not at this point in time. Moreover, I had too many characters in mind, and doing justice to all of them would have required an enormous plot which was beyond me. There are cricketers who go out to score a century in their debut match. I am not one of them. In life I have always mastered things gradually and with persistent application. Writing was not going to be any different. As a realistic ambition, I decided to break down my world into three stories. It was the same world, but with different characters and plots. Accepting my limitations was an important step towards completing the book.

I mentioned at the beginning that writing can be both easy and difficult. Let’s unpack this. Writing is easy when you are honest. When you are not trying to be someone else, not trying to follow a trend, not trying to please your future audience. If you are writing literary fiction, your writing will be an outlet for your inner feelings. If you are strongly ideologically inclined, it will show in your writing. It should, because I am assuming that expressing your strong feelings is one of the purposes of writing literary fiction. The biggest disservice you can do to yourself and your readers is present a work that is not you.

So when is writing difficult? Most of the time! You underestimate yourself – the classic imposter syndrome. You feel nobody is interested in what you have to say. Commercial considerations are constantly spinning around in your mind. Is it worth the time spent? I have no answers for this conundrum. Every person is in a different situation in life, and they are the best judges of how their time should be invested. What I can tell you is this – don’t do it half heartedly. Don’t stretch it for too long and don’t think that a story is something you can write a few pages once every month, taking years to complete it. In 5 years you will be a different person and will probably hate the earlier pages you wrote. Such projects are likely to be abandoned. Creative writing is also difficult if you are trying too hard or if you are not giving your brain a rest. Yes there will be days when your brain is delighting you with machine like productivity. But on other days, you need to recharge it with new thoughts. The lead characters in Mangoes from Devil’s Garden came out from a childhood memory of watching two urchins, probably siblings, looking longingly at wealthier children riding bicycles. This flashback would have never occurred if my brain was not relaxing and reminiscing.

Someone asked me – which character in Kalpavriksham is most like you? I had anticipated this question. And I had kept my answer ready – All of them. There is a little bit of me in all the characters. When you write honestly, you end up giving your personality to your characters. It may or may not be the right thing to do. After writing just one book, I cannot claim to be an expert on these things. Perhaps it works for certain genres and doesn’t for some. But I do feel that you should be there somewhere in your book. Either as the universal narrator or one of the main characters.

When I started writing this post, I didn’t want to make it a list of dos and donts. I am hoping it doesn’t sound like one :). There is plenty of stuff out there from far greater experts than me telling you about all that. All those are worth reading, especially if you are going to write page turners or more conventional plot heavy stories. If you are planning to write a non-fiction book, your journey is more sorted. So what next after Kalpavriksham? I continue to write comics, which is enormous fun. There is definitely another book I want to write. I am not yet sure if it will be fiction or non-fiction. I do feel like researching deeply about some subjects and writing about them. This kind of writing may appear easy but it is not. When you are dealing with real world subjects you are under greater scrutiny. But that challenge is its own motivation.