Hello, dear subscribers!
If you’re on this mailing list, you subscribed to get updates regarding my novel India House, a saga following the first Indian freedom fighters, who operated out of a house in London, and ran incendiary literature, guns and bomb tech to revolutionaries in India.
The Journey To India House
I started writing this novel in April 2020, after being inspired by a talk by Sanjeev Sanyal. Now it’s April 2022, and my novel is still getting written.
At first, the novel moved very quickly, and I thought I was halfway there. Then I had to take a maternity break for over 8 months. When I started writing again, I found it very difficult to make significant progress. I barely added 10,000 words to my draft over a period of four months.
As I read more and more books about that period of history and those characters, I realized I suddenly had a lot of information that was at odds with my draft. For instance, I’d written a character Madanlal Dhingra as being a spoiled son of a rich pro-British family who spent all his time in London on wine, women and football. But when I read his biography, I realized much of that had been a British construction to malign him in the wake of the high profile assassination he had committed.
I’d thought Lala Hardayal would be a more prominent character in my book, but none of the research supported that, and neither did his biographer. I had to shelve all the clues I’d put in of him being a prominent person in the story. (Aside: He’s going to be a main character in the sequel though, so we’re good on that. I mean, he’s only the first Indian to teach at Stanford.)
I tried the Coursera novel writing course, and it asked me what the central conflict in my novel was. I didn’t know! Sure, outwardly, it was the conflict between the British authorities and Indian students in Britain. But there was no inner conflict in my main character. That was what was making my novel feel like a hollow recollection of events, rather than a story.
Next, I watched this movie called The Ghazi Attack. It’s a movie set in a submarine. The first half is a conflict between Kay Kay Menon and Rana Daggubatti, who play naval officers on the sub, trying to smoke out a Pakistani submarine in the 1971 war, and they differ on what approach to take. The tension there was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Sure, a lot of it was inspired by Crimson Tide and The Hunt For Red October. But I wanted to replicate that tension and conflict.
I just needed to rewrite everything.
The Summary
Shaunak, whose substack Espionage& that I highly recommend, asked me if I could write about espionage-ish things that my characters did in the 1900s while running an insurgency. Sure, why not, I said.
I started writing the story of my novel so I could filter out only the espionage parts for him. But my story just wouldn’t end. I kept writing it and writing it. I finally gathered all my research into one single coherent narrative. Before I knew it, it was a 20,000 word piece that’s fun to read by itself.
Writing this summary, I realized a few things:
The inner story here is how Savarkar goes from a small-time community organizer to a leader of men. At the beginning, he only has influence over others of his age and commitment level, and his conflicts are at the college principal level. But as the story progresses, he clashes directly with the British Secretary of State for India, and he attracts people of various backgrounds who look up to him. A lot of people are willing to get jailed, tortured and killed under his influence. On the one hand, there is the attractive proposition that he stays as an ideological leader, writing columns in newspapers while staying safe in a sympathetic country. On the other hand, there are people losing their lives and livelihood for being even distantly connected with him. How he deals with these pressures while dealing with tragedies in his own life is what molds him into a leader. This is what my novel should really be about.
I thought the assassination of Curzon Wyllie would be the climax of the book. No. It is the midpoint. So much happens after the assassination that is exciting, tense, and yet somehow driving you to tears.
I can’t start my novel with India House. It all starts with the assassination of Plague Commissioner Rand in 1897 by the Chapekar Brothers. Starting my novel with an assassination, what fun!
This fits in well with the Save The Cat beatsheet.
This summary could work as a nonfiction book by itself. There’s a more detailed and excellently researched book by Adam Yamey which I highly recommend you to read, but this TL;DR could be great to read too.
And a few non-novel related realizations:
Gopalkrishna Gokhale got Bal Gangadhar Tilak arrested by leaking information that was certain to get him put away for sedition. This created a leadership vacuum in the Indian National Congress that was eventually filled by Gokhale’s mentee, a man named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
I found an error in how Vikram Sampath in his well-researched tome on Savarkar interprets an event in Savarkar’s life. I tweeted it to him and haven’t received a response. It is not a major error in the scheme of things, but hey. More on this later.
Gandhi, a strict vegetarian, was pretty traumatized by his first experience at India House where Savarkar was cooking prawns,. When he was asked to preside over a Vijaya Dashami celebration conducted by the same people a few years later, he insisted that he would only do so if the meal was made from scratch and it was fully vegetarian.
The British were monsters.
So I took some time off over December, when I was with family who could watch my kid, and finished writing this summary. It was pretty complete, and I was happy with it.
I then wrote down individual scenes on index cards. It came to about 100 scenes. That’s a lot.
Then I looked at the Save The Cat beatsheet. My story fits the “road trip” genre. Of course, it isn’t a road trip, but it’s a journey all the same. There’s a main character, and over the course of following him, we meet with the cast. They come in and go out of the story for the most part, while the hero meets his goals (or fails to). There’s got to be the best friend character though, and a mentor character. There are actually multiple mentor characters and they can all die or go to Kalapani (which is somehow worse) in the spot where the hero is at his worst. And the ending, though it is sad (Savarkar ends up in Kalapani), has a hopeful note to it (His followers continue what he started, and he becomes a leader of men).
Actually Writing My Novel
With this focused plot, I began to write. I was down with Covid in the earlier part of the year (yes, it finally struck me), and when I finally started writing, I went nuts and wrote 36,000 words in the month of March.
I’m done with my first act. The second and third acts seem easier to write, as they are better documented, although wordier.
Things I learned:
I need to sit down to write for four hours even if the actual writing only happens in the last hour. The immersion is key.
Why is the immersion key? Because I need a movie running in my head, which I then transcribe into words. That’s the fastest way for me to write it. Everything has to go in the service of creating the mind movie - plotting, sitting down, consuming media, talking about my characters, sharing pieces of what I’ve written. If the mind movie flows, the words flow. Mind-movie is key.
I was initially worried each scene being 2000 words each was a problem because it was all so long. But my writing style flows quick, and you can get through reading 2000 words out loud in 5 minutes. Usually it takes 7 minutes to read out loud 1000 words in my experience, but my dialogue-heavy writing style makes the whole thing shorter. So I need not scrimp on descriptions, and can take my time writing scenes.
The descriptions though! I’m just going “{describe the hall here}” and “{what was an omnibus like in 1900s london}” because I can just get stuck researching forever and that’s not important at this stage. However, I’m reading this book on Edwardian England, and maybe that will help me describe things without thinking too hard.
I can consistently write 1300 words a day normally. More some days, but 1300 is a pretty achievable goal. I tried a lot of things to increase my word count. More time didn’t help somehow. Then I realized it’s all about the mind movie. The only way to get to 2000 words a day is improving the quality of my mind-movie.
Roadblock! a.k.a Writing With A Toddler
Gone are the days when I used to have writer's block. Now there’s words in my head all day and I just can’t seem to get to a goddamn desk, or stay there long enough.
Some parents seem to be able to get things done with their toddler around, but I’m not one of them. I’ve seen some children settle down with their toys and some sand or grain to scoop, and they just stay there busy while their parents work away at a desk nearby. My child isn’t one of them.
I thought I could stay with family for a while and write while my daughter spent time with grandparents, aunts, uncles, great-aunts, great-uncles, and what have you. We’re three weeks into the plan, and all that has happened is my child has intense stranger danger going on, and cries miserably unless her parents are nearby. I can’t even tune off when she’s asleep because I’m the only one who can get her to go back to bed if she’s roused. What fun.
Maybe there’s an upside to this, but it’s too early to even wonder what that might be. Deep work requires uninterrupted chunks of time, and toddlers are antithetical to that. The best I can think of is that I don’t sit at my desk all day, and waste all that time with my mind wandering, the way Chris Baty (of NaNoWriMo fame) says it is like when you try to write full time.
So right now, I’m limping back into writing, and trying to get back to productivity.
The Path Forward
I feel like a major fraud even having any plans or telling people about them, because everything seems to take longer than planned, or just doesn’t happen.
I have had an ADHD diagnosis for a while now. It has been useful in being able to recognize my procrastination for what it is, and not be too hard on myself. But I’ve never understood why I have to be this way at all. Until a month ago, when I came across this book by Dr. Gabor Mate called Scattered - The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder. It’s been the most consequential book I’ve ever read. I can write a whole other book about what that book has taught me, but the relevant thing here is I feel a little more confident talking about my plans.
The hope has been to release my book before August 15, because it’s Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, or the 75th anniversary of Indian Independence, and it’s important to have this book out before then.
I genuinely hoped to finish my first draft by next week, but given the past three weeks have been unmitigated hell, that won’t be possible.
But on the agenda is:
A short nonfiction book (about 30k words) about India House and the origins of the Indian independence movement. I’ve written this, it needs some detail added, structuring, and editing.
Serializing and posting chapters from my summary on this Substack.
Finishing the first draft of India House. I keep telling myself I’m just a month of dedicated work away from finishing my novel, and hopefully this time I actually am.
While I edit my draft, I’ll be posting chapters here for you to read, enjoy and give feedback on.
Self-publishing India House.
What you, the Subscriber, has to look forward to:
Expect more posts about my novel and the writerly life.
Novel summary broken up in chapters
Novel chapters in serial order
Interesting research I dug up (pertinent to the novel).
Thoughts on the Indian freedom struggle.
Reflections on parenting
Thank you so much for subscribing! Your support means a lot to me. You motivate me to write 500 words at 2am after a day of touristy wandering while wrangling a toddler. I love that you’re here.
All the best Lila! I feel your struggle and I wish you the best to get the book done on time for the Independence day.