How I became a writer

(It's a short story, not a novel)

Well, here it is then. Read along, won’t you, my splendid reader?

Like all writers, doesn’t matter how successful or prolific, I too started as a reader. As an eighties kid that grew up in the small towns of India, books were pretty much all I had in terms of my windows to the world and a trip to the library was my greatest joy. Clearly I was a raucous party animal even then.

This went on for many years. Sometime after finishing college, I attempted my first novel. It was handwritten on long, ruled sheets and had all the pathos and bleakness that my twenty-something self was capable of. The characters were either always climbing to the top of some corporate ladder or having their hearts brutally broken or getting into some really unlikely situations. I am glad I didn’t have the arrogance to send it out to publishers at the time. It would have most likely come flying back via return post. Or become a national bestseller, who can tell?

After this, I stayed low for several years, sticking only to writing long letters to my friends, excruciating in their attention to the most mundane details (As I sit here, next to the window, it’s raining outside and so on).

The writing bug is resilient though, even if we are not, and can stay dormant for many years, waiting for the right environment to come along. Mine did with my thirtieth birthday and the birth of my first child, both events marking the passage of time, the loss of time, time just about done with all the procrastination and screaming for attention. Much like the newborn baby I was holding at the time.

I started writing pretty seriously at that point. Fortuitously, I also came across Stephen King’s On Writing, which taught me how to think about the craft and the life that comes with it. I wrote everyday. I wrote a blog and I wrote a full-length manuscript and as happens when we do anything consistently, something wonderful happened. I finally found that something that is the greatest gift to anyone mad enough to want to do this – a voice.

Things happen when you find the voice. The good people in the publishing business know how to spot it, at least the good ones do. Someone spotted it for me and in me, and kickstarted the process that became my second career and my life.

That voice is the one you hear when you read this post and the one in which I have written several novels, some of which have been published. One of them is due for release soon. It’s called 17, Morris Road and I am like a new mother about it. I am physically incapable of thinking about or talking about or feeling anything else. I hope you will read it and let me know what you think. More about it soon.

Well, that’s it then, my writing story. A simple enough story of broadly just sticking with it till some luck comes one’s way. Let me know what you think? Many of my friends are writers of course but then, a lot of people also say they wish they could write the book that lurks somewhere within them. Are you one of those? Go ahead, tell me, I am listening.