Brilliant Idea for Software Developers

If you ever wrote a Job Description for an author or an aspiring writer, one criteria should be spelt out in bold letters - the ability to handle rejection slips. It is a death blow to one's ego. Handling that without seeking professional help in carrying out psychological repairs is not easy.

When I was sending out my manuscript to various publishers, I had initially taken a cautious approach. I would mail my stuff with a polite covering note and add a silent prayer while licking the stamp. You can't fault me for praying. I would send off the manuscript with the same fondness with which a parent sees off their child to college. Nobody expects them to dropout.

Then came the next bit - waiting for the mailman to bring in the response. I would bunk work just so that I could be there in person to receive the million dollar advance that the publisher might be sending me. Heck that's not how the real world works. I would get a prompt response back from the publisher. Yeah how long does it take to say "NO" - which part of the "NO" are you having difficulty comprehending, my friend would ask in a helpful manner.

Priya mentioned that these days the editors send electronic rejection slips. That's taking the art of insulting to new heights. Can't you take a couple of minutes to write a few lines to the person whose dreams you are stubbing out.

The only way of coping with this impersonal rejection slip system is to seek tech support. Maybe someone will figure out a technology that lets all aspiring authors to send one copy of the manuscript to every publisher in the world simultaneously and then stay pasted on the screen until he/ she goes through the darn story syllable by syllable. Thereafter, there would be an annoying pop up that asks the publisher, "Have you sent the million bucks yet?"

The accompanying piece of software the authors will need to install will allow all rejection slips to be filtered out so that it is only the acceptance letters that flow through to the in-box. Any takers?
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This blog entry was inspired by the comment Priya left on my blog. She talked about the auto-rejection slips sent by publishing houses.

How to Get Your Novel Published?

And You Thought Writing the Novel Was the Hard Part?

You have the novel ready. And you are now ready to count the steady flow of royalty. You have practised the odd moment of living it up like a rich person. So why is the publisher not grabbing your manuscript.

Heck - that's the reality check. Your publisher needs to feel that your manuscript is going to be the next Harry Potter or whatever last made a few good millions - for the publisher. Yes... you read that right. The publisher is really trying to gauge the readership of your novel. So in a very simplistic manner, they are not really trying to figure out if your plotline was intriguing or not. They need to know how many people are likely to BUY your novel.

How do you find a publisher?

Option 1: Get yourself invited to a dinner party where publishers are hanging out. Then try and strike up a conversation with one of 'em. NOT RECOMMENDED.

Option 2: Go to a literary festival or a writers' workshop. Helps to get you in the queue to pick up a few visiting cards of publishers and employees of publishing houses. Try and listen in to the panel discussions. That always helps. Listen to other writers and editors and publishers.

Option 3: Find yourself an agent. In US they have a book called the Writers Market. You can buy it off Amazon.com or a bookstore. That lists basically, which publisher is publishing the genre of novels that yours fits in. They list names of agents who will represent you to the publishers. Here is an interview with Eric Simonoff - the agent who represented Jhumpa Lahiri. Some of the agents want a "Reading Fee" - a hefty sum of money to read your manuscript with no obligations. Heck, it is a tough world.

Option 4: Keep sending the manuscript to the publishers directly. Most websites have addresses where you can mail the manuscript. Some want electronic version, some want the hardcopy, some want a pink bulldog to go with it. Whatever they want and in whatever format they want it - you increase the probability of someone reading it if you follow instructions.

And I don't know if I should say this to you, but... well... be prepared for the famous "Rejection Slip". I was told by an engineer that the number of rejection slips will always be one less than the number of manuscripts you have mailed, since one of them will be the acceptance slip. In mathematical terms the rejection slips will be n-1 if n is the number of manuscripts mailed. Well - he was wrong. I got more rejection slips than manuscripts mailed (one publisher sent me two of those pre-printed ones).

See sample Rejection Slip below

Dear

Your writing has a refreshing style and the plotline was really gripping and fabulous.

However... - this where it gets creative -

a) we have just stopped publishing this genre/ category of novels/ poems

b) we are understaffed and will not be able to pay attention to the manuscript for the next five years/ sixty months - whichever is later!

c) you have just missed the submission deadline for the next five years.

Yours sincerely (if THAT is sinecerely, I wonder what is not)

How to Write a Novel – Part 3

It Is All About (the) Character

The characters and their mannerisms and dialog together determine the flavor of the novel. I use to often sit back and reflect on the characteristics of the key players in my novel. I did short sketches of each person who would feature in my story. Yeah, I would very often draw the character as it existed in my mind and try to imagine what they would wear, what they would look like, what their dreams and aspirations were. I would also try and see who they would interact with and then look at the nature of their relationships while staring at the sketches. This is what I imagined Arunesh Nanda - the character in the novel who plays Dylan songs, to look like when I first introduced him in the story. This picture is from the sketchbook.

I wanted to build a protagonist and an anti-hero in the narration. So Abbey, was described as a directionless, fairly unambitious student of Delhi University who is insecure, is good in drawing and debates and all that. He is not very confident in himself and therefore wants to be a "somebody" by being seen with a pretty girl. Yet, he is unable to develop depth in a relationship.

So for a protagonist like Abbey, it was necessary to build a person who is exactly the polar opposite. That's what would make an interesting contrast in a novel. That's where Rascal Rusty came into the story. He had a solution to every problem and who had a precocious presence.

In plays and especially in the folk theater of Bengal (Jatras), there is a character - Vivek विवेक , who is quite literally the conscience of the main characters. This character is also a sutradhar who does a major part of the narration. I liked that idea and built it into the story format. Between the hero and the anti-hero was the "conscience" or Vivek of the story. That was Father Hathaway or Haathi. So the letter that he wrote for Abbey reminds the reader that there is a larger purpose of education that we need to keep in mind.

Many fictional characters have traces of their origins in the real world. I too have met interesting people with fascinating life stories and quirky personalities that would make great reading. Yet to blend the person into a story, the character may retain only 10% of the individual.

So to summarize:
1. Drawing and sketching the character as a starting point helps me visualize the details and imagine the conversational style of the person.
2. The time one spends in building the characters style of speaking adds authenticity to the novel.

How To Write a Novel - Part 2

Make Inspiration and Opportunity Coincide

The frequency of my writing this blog tells you of the biggest problem I faced while writing my novel. It is all about making inspiration and opportunity coincide.

People have different styles of writing. Some people make outlines of the novel first. The main characters are fleshed out along with key twists in the plot. I have tried many different approaches. I have tried the whole approach of spontaneous free flowing writing. I would just sit down and write a few sheets - yeah in that red colored notebook that I had mentioned. After writing for some 30 odd pages I decided to read the manuscript. Nothing made sense. I needed to edit it. I went back and forth and edited the pages by putting notations and punctuations. I used a different color pen to do the edits. Eventually it got too complicated. I abandoned the notebook. It was a bit unfair to the notebook that had actually made the whole novel happen. It is funny but for a while I carried a sense of guilt about using a laptop to write. Maybe some of that showed up while I wrote about Priya getting abandoned even though she was responsible for getting Abbey into MIJ in the first place.


Lessons learnt: Use a word processing software. It makes editing so much easier. A random emotion could be the springboard from which a character may take shape.

I faced another major problem. I painstakingly tried to transcribe everything and put it on my laptop. As soon as that happened I faced the dreaded thing called writer's block. I would just sit and stare at the screen and nothing would emerge. Some friend told me that Hemingway had advised writers to sit down at a fixed time and write something everyday. That kept the writers' block away. Great suggestion I thought. Then realized that if I could write something everyday, why would I be complaining of a block? Maybe great authors like Hemingway just had no clue of people like me.

That sterile phase continued for almost eleven months. During this time I had not made much progress beyond adding the odd chapter to the 30 pages I had typed out from my red notebook. In February 1998, I got transferred to a new role in Colgate and had to be based out of Kuala Lumpur.

The new job demanded one hell of lot of travel. All my plans of writing on the plane or in the evenings when I would be back to my hotel fell by the wayside. There would be a million little plot lines I would have thought of during the day. By the time I would be back to my hotel room, I would be so tired and sleepy that all I could do was to say like Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind, "I will think about it tomorrow."

How To Write a Novel - Part 1

Today happens to be an anniversary of sorts. I noticed that more people especially from Business Schools tend to ask me to address the student groups on Creative Writing. It is a great opportunity to share ideas not just on writing but on some things that I have learnt are very important to be able to write.

I started writing this novel on 13 May 1997 in Mumbai. It began in a very strange way. I had just quit working for an ad agency MUDRA to join Colgate Palmolive in Mumbai, India. That was Jan 1997. I got a few farewell gifts from my colleagues in advertising and one of them was a red colored bound note book. "Write some poems or short stories in it. "

I had on a few occasions thought of writing some short stories. Most of these were incidents or anecdotes about college and my friends that I had written to friends. Some of my friends told me that a few were funny. So I tried to reconstruct them in my mind. But not one of them sounded convincing. A few months went by. It was on 13th May 1997 that I wrote the opening lines of my novel in that red colored note book. It went like this:

"I do not know why I landed in this corporate jungle. Why I chose to do Human Resources Development. Why I did not decide to stop playing a game which I neither understood nor had any desire to learn. In fact, I did not even start off being in Human Resources. When I joined MIJ (Management Institute of Jamshedpur, Bihar) in the summer of 1982, the course I had enrolled for was actually called Industrial Relations and Social Welfare. At that time, there were only Welfare Officers. But that term really sucked. So some smart cookie who thought like Rascal Rusty, must have decided to “Tweak the formula, change the packaging and make a new commercial with a cute babe in a skimpier bikini,” as the Marketing guys did with all their soaps and toothpaste brands every year, and called it a relaunch."


The germ of the idea was there. I did not even know whether it would be another anecdote or a short story and certainly never thought I would take that forward and turn it into a novel. Notice the reference to soaps and toothpaste brands doing relaunch. That must have crept in based on what I might have seen around me as I interacted with my colleagues and friends in other FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) companies.

Having written the first para I sat back and tried to put together the plotline. I felt I should write a story that would be set in a college campus and then fine tuned it to be in a Business School setting that would give me two campus settings to develop my characters. In choosing to do a Business School campus I had the advantage of showing the transition of characters from being undergraduate college students to being in a B-School where one has to worry about getting jobs and the relationships start to get a tinge of seriousness. By writing that first para I had crossed the first major speedbreaker - what would I write about?

No plotline seemed unique enough. Would I write a love story? A murder mystery? I thought I would write something that would be fairly generic. Everyone seemed to have great memories of being in college. Yet when you look at Bollywood's depiction of college, it seemed to be such a far cry from what you and I would have experienced. So I wanted to write about an experience that would be real. Something that a college student in a small town university would be able to relate to as well as the experience of someone who went to a University in a metro setting. The story had to be a generic experience of growing up in India in the eighties. Instinctively that seemed to be real. I could write about that authentically. It was something I had experienced. A life that I had lived many times - vicariously through friends. There was something common to us all. Each unique life had common threads. The angst of not knowing what to do in life. Of trying to choose between college courses one had no clue about. The generic experience of falling in love in college. Of crushes. Of crazy friends. Over the years I had met college students especially during Youth Festivals and while travelling. From Bangalore to Allahabad, the experiences had a lowest common denominator that was common. that was the genesis of my story. It would be a story that would be a collage of moments that each reader could relate to.

So the first big lesson in how to write a novel:
Make a Beginning: Write about a moment or an event that you have soaked in. One need not have experienced everything to be able to write about it. It just needs to be something that is very close to your heart. If not, it is difficult to get under the skin of your characters.