Human + X: Creating Believable Aliens in Fiction

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So today I want to talk about aliens. More accurately, I want to talk about a subset of aliens.

The fictional variety.

The type of aliens that appear on the pages of science fiction novels, and in the episodes of space operas.

If real aliens exist, Hola to them too! Hope we see you guys soon. But for now, I’m gonna limit myself to the aliens created for our entertainment. AKA book and movie aliens.

In fact, now that I think about it, the points I’m about to discuss can apply to any non-human, sentient species. They don’t necessarily need to be alien, as in inhabitants of another planet. Earthly beings such as elves, dwarves, vampires, and were-animals of all sorts also qualify – although these are more likely to appear in fantasy than sci-fi.

The point is, the thingy needs to be not human, and self-aware enough to realize that it is not, and what that entails.

What Measure is an Alien?

The thing that first got me thinking about aliens was the need to create versions of them for my own stories.

You see, one thing that had always bothered me about fictional aliens was just how…human they seemed. Aliens in fantasy and sci-fi seemed to me to just be humans, plus something extra.

For example, Vulcans are humans plus excessive logic and pointy ears. Elves are pretty and wise humans. Dwarves are short and mechanically inclined humans. Werewolves are humans with sharpened senses and (sometimes) heightened aggression. You get my point. What was so alien about these aliens anyway??

Points of Difference

The problem I often seemed to encounter in fantasy and sci-fi alike was that the results of these differences were never discussed. For example, how would a race that lives for thousands of years view time? I mean, if an elven species lives for thousands of years, why would they even feel the need to go to war with humans? It’s like humans going to war with goldfish. What’s the point? The humans would die of old age by the time the elves have decided on the type of arrow to use.

Similarly, would a species that never dies consider murder a crime? If yes, then why?

How would a race that is overly dedicated to logic design clothing? Would their perception of beauty also be influenced by their preoccupation with logic, so that they see the most logical attire as the most beautiful one in the given climate? Would they even understand the concept of subjective attractiveness?

These are just some of the questions about aliens that have haunted me for quite a few years now. This affliction was only made worse when I started world-building for my own novel.

My Own Personal Alien!!

For my novel, I’d created an angel-like race called Aeriels that were essentially peaceful by nature, but had been driven – through a series of events – into a destructive war with humanity. The question then was, why were they fighting if they were so peaceful? But more importantly, why were they peaceful in the first place?

This question was easily answered by the fact that the Aeriels did not need food or water, they sustained themselves with sunlight. And they came from a world where the sun literally never set. So the Aeriels had never learned to fight because they had never needed to compete for scarce resources. It’s like if humans could survive simply by breathing air. This, of course, led to all kinds of confusion on their part when they realized the humans wanted to settle scores with a good old fashioned war!

Some Examples of Awesome Aliens in Fiction

And this is not to say that none of these questions were ever satisfactorily answered in the world of mainstream science fiction or fantasy. I once read a novel about a hive-mind species that didn’t mind if individual members of their race were killed, because to them each individual is just an extension of the planet-wide hive-mind. I mean you wouldn’t really care if somebody cut off a bit of your hair (even without your permission). Sure, you might be annoyed with them, even temporarily angry, but you wouldn’t want to send them to prison over it. That was pretty much how this species viewed the murder of its members…like cutting off bits of hair!

I also really liked the explanation given in a very popular vampire novel, for a family of vampires having a lot of money. You see, they invested in the stock market. And because they live forever, they’re basically reaping the benefits of centuries’ worth of compound interest. I thought that was quite a brilliant piece of detail. I mean, the only thing hotter than rich vampires is rich vampires who’re savvy investors, amiright?!!

The thing with alienness, of course, is that there are different varieties of it. What is it that makes an alien, alien? Therein lies the question.

The Various Types of Alienness

Of course, there’s the obvious. Those who are physically alien. If a spaceship lands on your backyard, and a creature emerges from it that has five heads and three pairs of wings, you can be reasonably sure that it is an alien.

Then there is psychological alienness, which is slightly more subtle. A creature that does not consider lying a problem because it can read people’s minds. Or, like I said above, a creature that doesn’t think murder is wrong because it cannot die.

The thing about depicting profound psychological differences is that they would also lead to differences in motivation and goals. Much of what humans do (working, socializing, etc.) is at a fundamental level geared towards survival. The survival of the individual and his tribe. So how would a species behave that is not motivated by the need to survive, because it cannot die?

Psychological differences can also arise from physical differences. To take the example above, would a creature with five heads be more intelligent, or would it have multiple personalities? If it has a brain inside each of those heads, would those brains always work in tandem with one another, or might they sometimes be in conflict? Would a hive-mind be capable of understanding the value of an individual life?

Finally, there are cultural differences. Cultural differences are a culmination of both physical and psychological differences. Cultures are created by the individuals of a species. For instance, humans have a culture that considers stealing a crime, because we value the concept of personal wealth. Would a being belonging to a hive mind even comprehend the concept of stealing?

On the other hand, would a race that relies exclusively on logic, consider it illegal to steal from someone who has something in excess, and would therefore not really miss the thing that was stolen? I mean logically, if a person who earns a hundred bucks a day were to steal another hundred from someone who earns a thousand a day, then the theft would effectively double his income while only making a small dent of 10% on the income of the person from whom the money was stolen.

From a purely logical point of view, might that not just be seen as efficient allocation of resources? If it was, then might we have a culture of hyper logical beings that actually encourage stealing as a form of income redistribution for efficient resource allocation? Or would that responsibility fall to the government in the form of tax collection? What might Vulcans have to say about that idea?

I once watched a movie about aliens that could see the future. They also looked like octopuses and had multiple legs/tentacles. They wrote in a circular script, where they began to write from two ends with both hands at the same time. The sentence ended in a perfect circle, with both hands meeting at exactly the same place.

Now imagine trying to write one sentence with both hands at once, your left hand starting at the beginning of the sentence and your right hand starting at the end. You’d have to calculate to perfection, exactly how fast both of your hands would write, how much space each letter in the sentence would require, and how many words each of your hands will be able to write before it meets the other one in the middle. Moreover, you will also have to know before you begin a sentence exactly how you’re planning to end it.

When you think about it, isn’t that language and script the natural consequence of a culture that can look into the future, just as tools are the natural consequence of a culture that has opposable thumbs?

The Problem of Relating to Truly Alien Aliens

The problem with writing truly alien aliens, of course, is that they’re not very relatable. It’s one thing to have a morally grey protagonist, but how do you deal with a morally orange love-interest? Black and white characters might well be boring, but if the spectrum of your character’s morality starts at bright pink and ends at fluorescent green, readers might have a bit of a hard time trying to understand their motivations, much less relate to them.

And I suppose that is one of the major reasons why writers and movie makers choose to create aliens that are basically: Human + X.

Because they’re relatable, and it’s hard to get readers to care about a character who is difficult to relate to on a fundamental level. Most people seek early on to establish a connection with the characters that they are reading about (or watching, for that matter).

And that connection is hard to come by when you’re trying to imagine a creature that has access to the memories, thoughts, and experiences of every member of its species that has ever been born – as would be the case for a hive mind. How would a being like that think or act? And as a very human writer with a very limited ambit of accumulated experience and knowledge, how can you even begin to depict such a creature?

How, for that matter, can you accurately guess the emotional conflicts of an immortal being, when you yourself are very mortal, as is everyone else you know? Personally, I would think immortal vampires would struggle far more with culture shock than any romantic angst. I mean, my grandmother can’t stop talking about how different things were in ‘her time’, and she wasn’t even alive a hundred years ago. Can you imagine how much worse it would be if you lived for a thousand years?!

Well, those are just my ideas, anyway. You can, of course, think differently. Let me know in the comments below what kind of aliens you’d like to see in science fiction and fantasy!

Cultural Narratives: Building an Identity Upon Fairy Tales

It was a tiny article published on one of the inner pages of the morning paper that first made me think about the idea of cultural narratives, which came to be one of the major themes underlying my second novel. The story was so inconsequential, I don’t even remember any of the details anymore. And neither, I suspect, do the people who wrote it over two years ago. Essentially, the piece talked about some kind of disagreement between India and Pakistan in the UN. (Surprise surprise)!

The details are irrelevant, since I’m not interested in talking about who was right or wrong. Quite honestly, I don’t remember enough about the incident to be able to make any sort of an objective judgment.

I do remember quite distinctly, though, that the article seemed to suggest (very strongly) that the Indian representatives at the UN had garnered a significant amount of support for their cause and that India had overall ‘won’ the dispute, whatever it had been about. This was never stated outright in so many words, but the vibe of the article was definitely celebratory.

Imagine my surprise, then, when a few hours later I came across an article about the very same incident while reading one of the most popular Pakistani newspapers on the Internet. Plot twist!!

The thing that fascinated me about the two versions of the incident is that, as far as I remember, the facts listed were almost identical. However, this article implied (very strongly, again) that it was in fact the Pakistani side that had garnered the maximum support from the international community.

Building a Narrative

As I said, my purpose here is not to pass judgment on the veracity (or lack thereof) of either version of the story. Truth is, it doesn’t even matter. The two articles weren’t contradicting each other about the facts. Stripped of the narrative direction and tone, the facts stated were almost identical.

But the narrative was very much there in both the pieces. The subtle hints in the phrasing and the set-up of the story would have been hard to miss for anyone over the age of fourteen. Which brings us to the most important question of all.

What is this elusive thing you call a narrative?

Well, for the purposes of this article, we’re going to be talking about cultural narratives. Cultural narratives aren’t good or bad. They just are. If you have a culture, you can rest assured that it has a narrative, whether you know it or not.

By its very nature, a narrative is a story. But it is also a story with elements of the truth. No civilization can stand for long upon a narrative based completely in fiction. So some truth is essential for a narrative to be successful. But at the end of the day, a cultural narrative is a story that aims to make a statement. To prove a point.

Making a Statement

What that point is will vary from culture to culture, and from time to time within cultures. But the fact that they have a point to prove is universal.

The thing is, though, bare facts usually don’t have a point. They just are.

Incidents don’t point smoothly and consistently in one direction. They just happen. The truth is confusing and contradictory and muddled up. There are no eternal heroes or eternal villains. Everybody is a hero and a villain at different points in time.

But a narrative that is confusing and contradictory and muddled up is not a very good narrative, is it? Would you buy that story book for your kid? I wouldn’t.

So a good narrative must pick and choose facts and incidents that help it prove its point; that enable it to make the statement that it wants to make.

And this is not to say that the storytellers are trying deliberately to be deceitful (though in some situations this might indeed be the case). The fact of the matter is that a good story is not necessarily an accurate record of events. And vice versa. An accurate record of events is not necessarily a good story.

So you have to decide on what the goal is that you’re trying to achieve. And if your goal is to create a compelling narrative for your people, artistic liberties need to be taken, with or without an insidious agenda.

Now, the question might arise, is it necessary to have a cultural narrative?

Well, I’d say it is, if you want to have a culture at all.

It’s human nature to build narratives around things. We just seem to be biologically wired to like stories. And it’s not just countries, cultures, and civilizations that we build narratives around. We tell ourselves stories about our own lives, about our own identities, all the time. It helps ground us; helps us make sense of the confusing, contradictory, and muddled reality that we inhabit.

The ultimate fact of the matter is, we’re teeny little transient balls of flesh in a vast universe that doesn’t give a shit. We NEED good stories to block out that reality.

So the next question might be, why do cultures need narratives?

After all, a culture is not an individual. It’s not even a thing, as such. It’s just this ambient sense of identity and common cause that a bunch of people feel or subscribe to at any given time. Culture can be hyperlocal or global in scope, though it’s certainly not bound by geography. Not in the age of the Internet.

The thing is, cultures are built on the basis of shared ideas. And ideas cannot exist without narratives. An accurate record of facts is an accurate record of facts. But you need a story, a narrative, to give any meaning to those facts. And meaning is inherently personal, so stories are inherently biased.

Too theoretical? Okay. Let me try and put this in concrete terms.

Why do we feel a sense of loyalty to our country (even after we have left the country), but don’t feel the same loyalty to our neighborhood, or district, or continent? All of those are geographical constructs.

Why should I be any more proud to be an Indian than I am of being a Kalikapurian (Kalikapur being the name of my neighborhood)? For that matter, why should I be more proud of being an Indian than of being a South Asian, or an Asian, or an inhabitant of the Eastern Hemisphere?

I’ll tell you why.

Because being Indian has a cultural narrative associated with it, as opposed to being a Kalikapurian or an Eastern Hemispherer.

I suppose you could say there are also some narratives associated with being Asian or South Asian, but they are certainly weaker than national narratives. There is nothing that makes the geographical construct of a country more significant than the geographical construct of a district or a continent. Nothing other than narratives and stories, that is.

The Necessity of the ‘Other’

So we need stories (a narrative) to form a cohesive identity for any group of people, just as we need them to form the identity of an individual. But there’s more to it than that.

A group is only a group if it has some members. Equally important, though, is that it is only a group if it has some non-members.

Being Indian only means anything if there are people who are not Indians. If everyone was an Indian, then Indian would just become a synonym for human. The word would lose its meaning. Similarly, being human only means anything if there are creatures that are not human. If every living creature was a human, then the word human would just be a synonym for living creature.

No matter how big or small a group is, it must have an in-group AND an out-group in order to exist. There must be people who belong to the group. And equally important, there must be those that DON’T BELONG.

A cultural narrative, therefore, provides a bedrock of common beliefs and shared ideas that identify the in-group in contrast with the out-group. The people who believe in the narrative belong; those who don’t, don’t.

And this is true for all groups, no matter how liberal or conservative. Feminism has a narrative, as does the patriarchy. Communism has a narrative, as does capitalism. You get the picture. For a culture to exist, you need a cultural narrative.

A Source of Inspiration and Unity

Another major role of cultural narratives, of course, is to provide inspiration. A good story can inspire you to do a number of things, both good and bad.

It can inspire you to go risk your life in order to defend absolute strangers who live miles and miles away. It can also inspire you to attack random strangers who live miles and miles away.

You wouldn’t go to war for your district or your neighborhood, would you? You might at best consider participating in a cricket match, but certainly nothing more dangerous than that. But you might very well consider going to war for your country.

Which doesn’t really make sense, when you think about it.

I mean, you probably know many of your neighbors and have a personal connection with a few of them. I’m pretty sure the percentage of your countrymen you know or care about on a personal level is far lower. And yet you’d be more willing to risk your life for a bunch of absolute strangers than for acquaintances whom you could at least pick out in a crowd.

This is what a cultural narrative does. It builds a sense of unity and common cause, even where there is no logical reason for a common cause to exist.

I mean, I live in Kolkata, West Bengal. My city is geographically closer to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, than it is to Delhi, the capital of India. It is both geographically and linguistically closer to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.

And yet, I felt the blood thrum in my veins when I watched Dangal, a movie about two Haryanvi girls representing India on the international stage. I could feel my breath catch when Geeta (one of the protagonists) won her first gold medal at the Commonwealth Games.

Makes no sense, does it though? I had nothing in common with either of the two heroines. I don’t speak Haryanvi, and I’m certainly not a wrestler. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve watched a wrestling match on TV, and still have fingers left over.

So why on earth did I feel so inordinately good about the fact that they’d won gold medals on India’s behalf at the Commonwealth Games? Why would it matter to me? Would I have been equally psyched to see them win on behalf of my district, or on behalf of the subcontinent? Maybe. I wouldn’t know. Because those movies haven’t been made. Nobody made a movie about district-level wrestling matches. That says something about our priorities, and about the power of narratives, doesn’t it?

As I said, they have the power to create a sense of unity and common cause where neither of those things have any reason to exist. Now depending on the context, that can be a good thing or a bad thing. But it definitely is a thing that we have to live with.

Whether it works for us or against us depends largely on who’s telling the stories and why.

So then, you might ask me, how do you build a narrative? What are the components that come together to create one?

How Do We Build Cultural Narratives?

Well, there are several different ways of building a cultural narrative. One of the most common (and easiest) ways is to simply repeat the same story over and over again, for years and generations, over various platforms and mediums, until people start to believe it. For best results, you should try and keep some elements of the truth in it. An easily falsifiable story won’t stand the test of time (not to mention the Internet).

Hand in hand with the promotion of one idea goes the censorship of others. By censoring and stifling contradicting versions of the story, you can create a bubble where only one version is heard and echoed over and over again.

Totalitarian regimes have been doing this for ages. We might think fake news is a new thing, but it’s really not.

Since time immemorial, people have been convincing other people that chanting a particular sequence of words in a particular way is going to please an invisible power who shall then grant their wishes.

And if that’s not false propaganda, I don’t know what is. And yet various versions of this story have been widely and sincerely believed by millions of people across numerous cultures and time periods. Across time, people have been persuaded to do all manner of amazing and ridiculous things with the help of a compelling narrative.

The world really does belong to the articulate.

So what happens when this bubble bursts?

When we find out, surprise surprise, that the narrative we’ve always believed in is in fact not the only narrative in circulation? That the world of stories is not so much a planned meal as an eat-all-you-like buffet serving multiple cuisines?

Culture shock.

Yup. Culture shock is essentially just the shock we feel when we realize that the whole world does not in fact think like us, and act like us, and believe the same things as us.

It’s a strange thing to be surprised about, but surprised we inevitably are. And not just by the way people live and think in far-off lands. But even by the way they lived and thought just a couple of generations ago. Or the way they will live and think a couple generations later.

We are as scandalized by our parents and our children as we are by the most foreign of foreigners. The past, as they say, is a different country. They did things differently there.

The same can be said of the future too.

Wait a couple decades, and you’ll get to experience culture shock without having to spend a penny on international flight tickets.

So at the end of the day, are cultural narratives good or bad?

The truth is, there’s no easy answer to that question. A narrative can definitely be a necessity.

If you want soldiers risking their lives defending arbitrarily drawn borders on a map, you need a compelling narrative to inspire them to do so. If you want people leaving the comfort of their homes on Election Day to come out and vote for a remote leader they will never meet, endorsing policies they don’t understand, you’ll need a good story to make them want to do so. If you want people to tune in to support their country for the World Cup, well, you will need a compelling narrative for that as well.

But can a cultural narrative be used for something more nefarious than that? I’m pretty sure we all know the answer to that. Enough wars have been fought and enough corpses buried in the name of faith, patriotism, and belief systems of all kinds.

The Changing Face of Cultures and Their Narratives

In recent years, the growth of the Internet has served to dismantle and disprove many of the old narratives. Some cultures have sought to counter this onslaught by (trying to) control the Internet and other forms of communication technology, with varying degrees of success. Others have tried to leverage the technology by shouting loud enough that all other voices are drowned out.

Which is not to say that you can’t build a narrative for the greater good.

The rapid acceptance of the LGBT community in countries across the globe would never have been possible without media influencers actively working to create a cultural narrative where being gay was seen as a natural and even a desirable part of one’s identity.

As ever, the problem arises when people have conflicting ideas about what constitutes the ‘greater good’.

The Internet has also given rise to new forms of culture, and by extension, new types of cultural narratives. Online information bubbles are becoming more and more common every day. Different forums and communities have their own subcultures.

There’s a vast difference between the way you’d interact with someone on Tumblr and on Quora. Reddit, 4 Chan, Twitter, YouTube…all have their own unique cultures and subcultures.

Language and topics that are deemed acceptable on one forum may well be considered completely inappropriate on another. Even the number of emoticons you use in a message might be affected to a great degree by the ‘culture’ of the platform you’re posting on.

The Future of Cultural Narratives

So is it that we humans just need to believe in some form of narrative (no matter what it is or on what basis it is formed), in order to be happy and productive? Or is the need for cultural narratives something that we shall one day rise above as we grow and evolve as a global civilization?

I don’t know. I can’t imagine what a world without these narratives would even look like. But maybe someday our descendants will find out. And maybe they too will experience some amount of culture shock when absorbing the weird tales their ancestors had taken for the truth.

I don’t have the answers. But maybe someday, humanity will.

So let me end with a quote from the book that inspired this long-winded rant of a post in the first place:

“But that doesn’t make for a good war-narrative, does it? Not much by way of a thrilling bed-time story for the children – of the victory of good over evil. Not the sort of thing you tell Hunters before you send them off to face death fighting superhuman terrorists.”

“It’s the truth, though,” Ruban said simply.

But is the truth enough? That’s the question we need to answer over the decades and the centuries that are yet to come. But there’s no rush, is there?

It’s not like we’re going anywhere.

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Book Links: Goodreads & Amazon

Poetry: She Sat Beside Me On the Minibus

Clad in tattered white and a toothy smile

She huddled beside me on the rickety minibus

I didn’t say hello, never asked why

She told me anyway, her destination was the Ultadanga Terminus.

The Transport Department were pussies, she said,

In terms more colorful than I can in decency convey

The municipality? A bunch of thieves!

Sprayed diluted pesticide, never swept the leaves.

Her husband, she said, had been an officer,

Might’ve been a peon or an auditor.

Either way, he showed ‘em their place

Fought the good fight a fortnight, then vanished without a trace.

Swatting a mosquito with dirt-stained fingers,

She told me the Chief Minister will die of Dengue fever.

Rubbed her face with the frayed ends of an ancient saree

Assured me the state of the nation was quite dreary.

Had she been in government? A private petitioner?

Her nephew’s in the Assembly, her son a commissioner.

She has nothing to be afraid of, she’s quite sure

At 82, there ain’t much she hasn’t endured.

Gazed out the window when the conductor came by

Muttered about inflation and ignored his cries.

I bought two tickets, one for the Ultadanga Terminus

The man cursed, she smiled, I got off the bus.

The Problem with ‘Problematic’ Fiction: A Defence of Vampiric Alpha Billionaires

(Image Source)

Why is fantasizing about being in a semi-abusive relationship with a hot billionaire any worse than fantasizing about being an orphaned Chosen One hunted by a dark wizard?

That was the question I was faced with yesterday, while browsing the Goodreads comment section for a run-off-the-mill billionaire romance/erotica. Now I am by no means saying that this book was an outstanding work of literature. I haven’t read the book, so I have no way of knowing what kind of quality it has to offer.

That Which Separates Fantasy and Reality

But one of the major (and common) complaints about it on the comment section was that the relationship that it featured was ‘problematic’. And that reading about this problematic relationship might adversely affect young readers who would then proceed to expect this sort of behavior and dynamic in their own relationships.

These sorts of concerns are nothing new. It’s the exact same sort of thing people have been saying for years about a plethora of books including Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, A Court of Thorns and Roses and myriad other YA titles.

It’s not that I don’t understand where the critics are coming from. The twenty-seventh time you read about some alpha dude getting his knickers in a twist because his lady-love has spoken to another man is twenty-six times too many, in my opinion. But that’s just my taste in bedtime reading. It doesn’t have to be yours. And while everyone is allowed to rant about tropes they find annoying, of course, it is the accompanying moral handwringing that I find quite uncalled for.

I mean, that line of argument doesn’t even make sense. Not really. If reading about Christian Grey makes you seriously consider hooking up with an abusive billionaire, what’s to say reading about Batman wouldn’t make you seriously consider dressing up as a nocturnal mammal and beating up street thugs?

It might, of course. But in that case you’ve got far bigger problems to deal with in life than your exposure to ‘problematic’ fiction.

Why is it that everyone seems to think young girls reading Twilight might go on to have unhealthy relationships thanks to their exposure to the book, and yet nobody seems to have the same concerns about young boys watching The Fast and the Furious growing up to become reckless drivers?

I mean both of those things are theoretically possible. It’s just that we (normally) trust people to know the difference between fantasy and reality. The only demographic to whom this courtesy is not extended seems to be young women reading over-the-top, Harlequinesque romances. Never mind the fact that most popular fiction is over-the-top, unrealistic, and ‘problematic’ in one way or another.

All Fiction is Problematic

I mean, sure, you wouldn’t really want a semi-murderous vampire to be obsessed with your smell. But then again, would you really want to have a lightening shaped scar on your forehead, acquired when some psychotic terrorist murdered your parents? For that matter, would you really even want to attend a school where people regularly fall off incredible heights after getting hit by giant flying balls on their broomsticks? Probably not. Definitely not the kind of place you’d want to enroll your children in.

Most people who get a kick out of murder mysteries probably don’t really want to be involved in a murder themselves. And even hardcore Captain America fans would probably balk at the idea of being injected with an experimental steroid to be deployed as a super-soldier to a real war-zone.

Would being exposed to Captain America at a young age make you more amenable to experimental drug trials? It might, but in that case you need therapy more than media censorship.

But none of these concerns keep us from enjoying those ridiculously over-the-top, yet unbelievably entertaining stories. Because we all know that what’s good in fantasy isn’t good in reality. What you find entertaining to think about is not the same as what you want to experience in your real, day-to-day life.

Reading and enjoying violent Mafia novels doesn’t mean you want to join the Mafia. In fact, most people who’re actually in the Mafia probably haven’t read that many Mafia novels at all. I’m pretty sure they’ve got more important shit to deal with. Like, you know, killing people and stuff.

So why should reading about overly-possessive alpha boyfriends mean that you’ll really end up in unhealthy and abusive relationships?

I’m not saying that that’s impossible. All I’m saying is that the one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. You can end up in an abusive relationship without ever having read a single book in the Twilight saga, just like you can become a drug kingpin without ever having watched The Godfather.

Never let anyone tell you that you need to consume ‘problematic’ media in order to have a problematic life, kids. Those two can exist completely independent of one another. I promise.

Arson, Murder, and Kissing Fuckbois

I was as annoyed as the next person with the Twilight frenzy that overtook the pre-teen population during the mid-2000s. I read all the intellectual-sounding criticisms and socially-concerned Twilight bashing that the Internet had to offer in those years. And when writing The Classroom Effect at the ripe old age of sixteen, I remember taking great care to ensure that none of my relationships could in any way, shape or form be associated with the dreaded P-word.

I was 23 when I started A Flight of Broken Wings, my second novel. It didn’t feature any significant romantic relationships. It did, however, feature two murders, one theft and multiple stabbings, many of them perpetrated by the hero and his allies.

And the irony of it all is that it never even occurred to me that any one of these elements might be seen as ‘problematic’ by my readers.

Why not, though? Why is a fictional sixteen-year-old dating a 200-year-old vampire any more problematic than a fictional sixteen-year-old becoming an assassin and killing villains? I mean if I had two daughters and one of them was planning to join an assassination squad while the other dated a sparkly fuckboi, I’m pretty sure I’d ground the first one for longer.

Why is being a killer ‘empowering’ while dating a werewolf is ‘problematic’? Wherein lies the difference between the fucked-up-ness of either of those life choices?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we maybe need to reexamine our ideas of what constitutes power and what constitutes weakness. And why one is more desirable than the other. Why are the stupid (and sometimes violent) fantasies of preteen boys deemed less ‘problematic’ than the stupid (and sometimes sappy) fantasies of preteen girls? And what kind of a relationship do we really even want to have with the world of fantasy?

Because you can’t tell me that reading about Edward Cullen makes you pine for a vampire boyfriend but reading about Bruce Wayne doesn’t make you want to punch criminals in a batsuit. And because acting on either of those impulses in the real world would probably land you in some pretty…problematic spots, if you know what I mean.

Let me know down below your take on the problem of problematic relationships in fiction.

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!

Poetry: An Elegy on the Death of My Fake Leather Sandals

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Starry-eyed, I peeked at you through the shop window

The salesman’s toothy smile was nothing to your new-polished glow.

Your fake leather belts and stiff rubber soles

Made me dream of journeys sans mud, debris, and potholes.

The salesman whispered the ‘discounted rate’ delicately into my ears,

I glanced down at my slender wallet and blinked back my tears.

My feet slid into your gentle folds, a warrior coming home,

I was fifty short but in your embrace, the world I wished to roam.

Your beauty was unsurpassed, though the insoles did itch,

And your buckles gleamed like fairy dust, when the toe-cap pulled a stitch.

You helped me traverse wet sand heaps on under-construction roads

You stood with me on the roller-coaster of rush-hour public transport.

You were with me through the muddy puddles, of early monsoon

Caked with dirt, you stayed alert, through alleys litter-strewn.

You held me in your hard embrace on broken footpaths

Helped me slink through curfew gates not even the cat could surpass.

And I should have known, you were too good for this town

My fake leather sandals with the rubber soles of brown.

As I hung off the bottom step of the spasmodic minibus

Beneath me the buckles ripped, the outsoles gave up.

And I know that over the months, we’ve had our fights

And I’ve said more than once that you were overpriced.

Though it’s true that I think you could have done with a discount

Never let them tell you, our bond wasn’t profound.

All my neighbors know of your tales of valor

What you lacked in durability, you made up for in glamor.

So what if the heels were rickety and the insoles tickled?

The road to affordable beauty with potholes is riddled!