Never Piss Off an Author

In a novel, I can make it rain in Mumbai whenever I like. I was born there and lived there for twenty-eight years, and I still could not describe a rainy day in Mumbai.

One sentence in three hours

I started writing to switch my mind off at the end of the day. The day’s work would follow me home, and I needed somewhere to put it.

Most nights, writing did not work. If nothing came in fifteen or twenty minutes, I stopped. On the nights I refused to stop, three hours got me one sentence.

So the coping mechanism needed its own coping mechanism. Usually that was chess. I would open with a gambit I had never played, just to see where the board went. Other nights I did Duolingo lessons without thinking, or fell asleep with the phone in my hand.

Duolingo is how I learnt a little Spanish. I was pleased enough with myself to show off to my daughter, who was four and a half. “My father” in Spanish, I told her, is “mi padre”. She laughed out loud, a proper devil’s laugh. To her, papa had just said he was farting.

I learnt to call it a bad day and close the laptop. Most days were bad days.

The calendar

A story happens on dates, even when the reader never sees them. I kept moving chapters around so the story would flow better, and the moves broke things further along. A date stopped matching. A crucial stretch of time went missing.

Nobody tells you a novel needs an audit.

So I scrapped the first version. I built a timeline for the whole book, and then reordered the chapters until the dates and the flow finally agreed with each other.

It was the least romantic part of writing the book, and it caught things I would never have seen on my own. In one chapter the dog, Goldie, was the wrong age for the calendar. In a few others, my main character’s age went into reverse gear.

I wanted to find those before a reader did.

The one perk

Never piss off an author. You might turn up in the next scene. We authors keep a scoreboard.

The neighbour who complains about every dog in the building could find himself living next door to seven of them, all of whom adore him.

The man who honks at a red light could spend an entire chapter stuck behind a wedding baraat.

The person who says writing is not a real job could get a character who has to explain, at every family function, what exactly he does all day.

I am not saying I have done this. I am saying I could.

The next one

The manuscript was finished and with my early readers, and I was waiting for their comments. Before the first one came back, the idea for the next book had already arrived.

It is still in research, and there is a lot of it left to do. These days I have so many ideas that my to-be-written shelf may soon overtake my to-be-read shelf.

When the writing starts, the bad nights will come back, and so will the chess.

So will the scoreboard. If you honk at me at a red light between now and then, keep that in mind.