On Writing the Novel I’ve Always Wanted to Read

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I wrote my first novel in the last two years of high school. I started it in the first month of class 11, and completed it exactly one month before my higher secondary exams the next year. Now it was a relatively short novel – barely touched 65000 words – with a linear storyline. Today, I could probably finish a similar project in less than six months. But I was sixteen and confused – not an unusual state of being – and full of doubts about my ability to actually complete a full-length novel.

You see, The Classroom Effect might have been my first completed novel, but it was by no means the first one I had ever begun writing. The first novel that I ever started working on was a detective story featuring a poisoned lipstick and three Japanese sisters, one of whom fell off a tree. 

It was inspired by an Indian detective TV show called ‘Krishna Arjun’ and a Japanese anime series called ‘Cardcaptor Sakura’, both of which I was obsessed with at the time. I was all of 8 years old and the first three chapters of the novel were written by hand on an old school diary that had been only partially filled with the previous year’s math homework.

The Making of ‘The Classroom Effect’

Campus novels had been all the rage in India for a few years by the time I began writing ‘The Classroom Effect’. Chetan Bhagat had released his trailblazing ‘5 Point Someone’ (which I shall defend till the day I die). Its success had led to the paperback market being flooded with stories about young college students falling in love. So of course, I thought I should follow the steps of those that came before and pen a campus novel.

There was just one problem with this plan, though. I wasn’t in college yet. I didn’t know what life was like in college. All the information I had about college life came from the dubious ‘youth shows’ of Channel V and the aforementioned campus romances. Let’s just say I wanted a bit more authenticity than that in my novel.

So I did the next best thing. I wrote a campus novel…about a school campus. To be specific, my school campus, mostly because it was the only campus I knew well enough to describe in a coherent and believable manner for over 200 pages.

And I absolutely loved the story while I was writing it. The characters were my babies, and I wanted them to do awesome things, have awesome lives! There was a part of me in every single one of them, and yet none of them was anything like me at all. 

I wrote about the life I had, combined seamlessly with the life I wished I had. I wrote about my friends and people I wished were my friends. I wrote about the things we had done, the pranks we had pulled, the rules we had broken – and made everything less lame and more adventurous than it had actually been. It was cathartic, to say the least.

I took two whole years of ill-advised shenanigans and packed them into a single day of unmitigated epic-ness that ended in a dramatic rescue and not one, not two, but three whole declarations of undying love. Yeah, over-the-top doesn’t even begin to describe it!!

Writerly Lessons Learned and Wisdom Gained

I grew a lot as a storyteller over the two years that I wrote that book. And writing ‘The Classroom Effect’ taught me a few important lessons.

The first was that campus love stories weren’t really my thing. I knew this because the only campus novel that I had actually read and enjoyed was the one that arguably started it all, Chetan Bhagat’s ‘5 Point Someone’. I had tried to read a few after that, but for some reason could never really complete any of them.

I guess I should’ve known from the beginning why writing in a genre that I could barely read wasn’t the best idea. But in my defence, I was following the age-old advice of ‘write what you know’. At sixteen, there wasn’t much I knew about other than high school and all that it entailed.

The other lesson I learned was that romance wasn’t really my thing. I am not a romantic person, never have been. And while I could talk (quite entertainingly) about romance as seen from an outsider’s perspective, I could never convincingly portray a romantic relationship from the perspective of the characters actually in that relationship.

And I jumped through some weird and interesting hoops to avoid having to write about earnestly romantic situations in the book, because something in me knew that I wouldn’t be able to do them justice; that they wouldn’t be authentic.

In the second year of college I started writing another campus raomance (this time actually set in a college) called ‘Frivolous Deceptions’. And again, I loved my characters to bits. But the trappings of a campus romance felt even more contrived now than they had in high-school; perhaps because I knew myself better now than I had then. Whatever the reason, I abandoned the project midway and didn’t write anything else in college. Well, I wrote other things, but nothing that could be descried as a novel.

Writing the Novel I Wanted to Read

So after I finished my education last year and decided it was time to write my next book, I asked myself: What do you really want to write about?

And my mind came up with an absolute blank.

I mean, I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. Not really.

I liked reading mysteries and thrillers, but I was often annoyed with their lack of character exploration and development. I liked reading fanfiction, but I was frequently annoyed by their over-the-topness, if you know what I mean. I also liked reading fantasy, but the idea of world-building scared the shit out of me.

Plus, I wasn’t really sure if any of these elements would hold my interest for the hundred thousand-odd words I would have to type out to create a complete novel.

So I decided to get scientific about it.

Asking myself what I liked obviously wasn’t working. So I decided to make a list. An exhaustive list of all the stories that I had ever loved, across mediums.

The completed list, once I had finished compiling it, consisted of 6 of my all-time favorite books, 2 anime series, 4 movies, 2 TV shows, 5 fanfics across multiple fandoms, and 1 song that I had been playing on loop for that entire week.

Okay, so step one was a success. I finally had a list of all the stories that I loved. The kind that got my blood thrumming in my veins and my breath coming a bit faster.

Now I just had to solve the most difficult part of the problem and we would be done. I had to find out why I loved these stories. What was it about them that I found so damn irresistible?

So one day I sat down with pen and paper and began patiently to make a list of all of my favorite scenes from every one of these stories (well, except the song, of course).

When I was done, I tried to analyze what it was that these scenes had in common. What tropes were they playing on, or subverting? What kind of atmosphere were they trying to build?

Finding the Loves of My Life

After weeks of wracking my brains for answers, I finally had something of a list. Yeah, you guessed it. I have a thing for lists.

To this day, I still believe that that was the best thing I could possibly have done for my writing career, though. It’s not something that would work for everyone, of course, but in that situation it worked wonders for me.

Making that list made me realize that the only person whose romantic stories I enjoyed reading was Jane Austen. And I probably only enjoyed them because she was more concerned with the social implications of a relationship than about the inner workings of the thing itself. In some ways, Austen had as much of an outsider’s view of romance as I did, only more nuanced and far more hilarious.

But what I loved most was the Pride and Prejudice trope that she used in many of her stories. And by that I mean the rivalry to love dynamic that was at the core of Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship, and to a lesser extent that of Emma and Mr. Knightley.

But while I did love the enemies-to-friends trope, I didn’t necessarily want to use it in a romantic context myself. Which brings us to my longstanding love for buddy cop shows. Well, they didn’t really need to be cops, any sort of crime-fighting pair would do. What was important was that the protagonists must be super different from one another, and must hate each other’s guts upon first meeting.

Common Law, White Collar, Rizzoli & Isles, even Castle – you name it and I’ve watched it. And I don’t see why The Man from Uncle should be left off this list, just because I watched the movie and not the TV show version of it.

The two anime series that I’d loved the most as a child were ‘Saiunkoku Monogatari’ and ‘Fullmetal Alchemist’, and I’ll admit that coming up with a similarity between them was the hardest. I did find it eventually though. You see, what underlay both of these stories was an intense focus on regional and national politics, combined with some fantastic elements.

And while Fullmetal Alchemist focused on early-twentieth century German politics and Saiunkoku Monogatari was all about feudal China (or its fantasy equivalent), they both talked about national and international politics, tensions between states and countries, political upheavals and maneuvering. I realized that some of the other anime series that I’d liked as a kid – such as Fushigi Yûgi and Kyo Kara Maoh – also dealt with these sorts of themes, though perhaps with less depth and finesse than the two I’ve already talked about.

The final ingredient to this potpourri of beloved tropes was added when I realized that I really enjoyed reading about themes of guilt and gratitude. And this is where my love-hate relationship with over-the-top fanfiction comes in.

Because fantasy-adventure TV shows and movies often don’t have the time to deal with the emotional repercussions of some of the shit that goes down in their story-arcs. I mean, how many fantasy political thrillers have you watched (or even read) that had a realistic take on PTSD? That really talked about the emotional aftermath of being tortured, being held captive, or watching a loved one die?

And don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that fanfiction does any of this in a realistic or believable manner. Well, sometimes it does, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. And I would be lying through my teeth if I said that I browse through AO3 at the end of a punishing day to read a realistic case-study of the symptoms of PTSD and depression. I don’t.

But the thing is, when you’re reading about characters that slay demons and lead revolutions every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, sometimes over-the-top is exactly what you need.

Would Captain America really go on a bender after losing his childhood friend Bucky and spill his guts to Tony Stark? Probably not. But then, you can never say never when dealing with a steroid-fueled super-soldier and an inebriated mad scientist billionaire philanthropist, can you?

And Finally – My Second Novel!

Of these realizations, and some others that will be talked about in future blog posts, was born my second novel – ‘A Flight of Broken Wings’. It started out as a fantasy narrative about two protagonists who were as different from each other as can be (and belonged to different species, just to really drive the point home).

The story revolved around a globe-spanning political conspiracy, imaginary countries and their not-so-imaginary geopolitical clusterfucks, murders, betrayals, national and racial preconceptions, and the mandatory fanficcy and over-the-top angst scene where everything goes to shit.

The life I was writing about was in no way the life that I knew (or ever wanted to, to be honest with you).

But it was a world I liked to imagine when listening to badass songs by a plethora of punk-rock bands. It was populated by characters who I wouldn’t necessarily want to live with, but whose shenanigans I would happily binge-watch on Netflix, and read fanfics about after. It had scenes I would roll my eyes at in a paperback thriller, then go make myself a hot-chocolate for the next chapter.

In short, I had written a story that I would thoroughly enjoy reading!

The Right Way to Write a Novel

And I don’t know if that’s the proper way to write a novel. And quite honestly, I don’t care! Because I had a hell of a time writing it. And I can’t wait for the day when I’ve finally forgotten the story enough to be able to experience it from the perspective of a first-time reader.

Because it is (at least for now) the only novel in existence that was custom designed to make me happy!

So I guess at the end of the day, all I’ve done is to tweak slightly the original piece of advice I received about how to write a novel. Writing ‘A Flight of Broken Wings’ has taught me that it’s not about writing what you know. It’s about writing what you love. It’s about creating your own favorite novel, made to order.

Because then, even if nobody else likes what you’ve written, you’ll always have one die-hard fan. And keeping her happy will make sure that you never want to stop writing!