How to write a novel (Part One)

This story begins towards the end of my summer internship at Citi, when completely bored by my miserable & pointless B-School existence, I announced my intention to write a novel to Narendra (Mani Ganesh). I had already quit the FMS Student Body and knew that I would be having a lot of free time in my hands come second year.

MG’s first suggestion was to do a sort of love story inspired by our real lives. But we both decided that however much we may sex them up, neither of our love lives were worth writing much about. The good thing is that having spent so much time together (at school & then at DCE), though we don’t exactly think alike (I am the creative and illogical one- he’s the mathematical genius and logical one) we could always understand the other’s point of view that much more easily.

So when I told MG that I had this story that I had just seen unfold before my eyes, I had his attention. The story began with a FB Update I had read that had set the novel’s story in my mind. Though I don’t remember it word for word, the Update went something like “I have come here and lost everything… I wish I had never left my job to join XXXX.” (Abridged)

Though this guy didn’t belong to FMS, Delhi and I choose not to reveal his identity, it set off this spark in my head. Here was a story- the story of the average recession impacted Premier League B-School guy- a story I had seen unfold before my very eyes, in one hue at least, at FMS. So we sat down one day (the first of many spent in my favorite slightly stuffy drawing room- where most of this book was written later on my Dell laptop) and noted down the broad plot outlines after one marathon session of brainstorming, which MG later meticulously converted to an excel file which became my plot reference.

And then we were off. I started gnawing off at the story one excel row at a time (we started out with 16 Chapters in Excel) which would later be sent to MG for review (and back to me for straightening out), while MG kept straightening out the plot road ahead. Often through impulsive “Flashes of Genius/ Stupidity” I would end up adding more to the plot or usually contorting the plot more than the Chapters Excel had foreseen, creating fresh problems for MG. In the end, though the story is broadly what we had started off with on that long stuffy marathon night, much of it is very very different, several of the characters have turned out very differently than we had started off with. I can only imagine that’s because I have grown with the characters and seen them more closely than anyone ever will.