Quirky tales behind bestseller novels!
Jeffrey Archer needs his pencils pre-sharpened before he enters his study to write his book. The famous crime novelist Agatha Christie would sit in her luxurious bathtub and eat apples as her grey cells got to work. Here are a few quirks that our Indian authors also have.
Author of The Gameworld Trilogy and the Terrors on the Titanic, Samit Basu says, “I tend to make multiple copies of all my drafts. It will be in numerous email accounts, USBs, CDs and the whole nine yards.” Crime thrillers and fiction novelist Ashok K Banker says that he is an obsessive compulsive writer who can never stop writing. “After finishing my exams I would start scribbling on the question paper. That’s how I started my first novel,” he recalls.
Bengaluru-based author Preeti Shenoy, who has bestsellers like a Tea for Two And A Piece of Cake and The Secret Wishlist, reveals her fetish. She says that the outline of all her novels are always written in black ink on a special handmade journal that she picks up while travelling. “For every new book there is a new journal and I always write in it only with a black ink fountain pen,” she says. On probing more Preeti reveals that even in school when most students wrote with blue, she would want to write in black. “I even checked with the CBSE rules if I could use black ink in my exams,” she adds. Apart from the stationary, this author cum artist also needs her solitude to write.
While Amish Tripathi, author of the Shiva Trilogy, says he has no specific habits barring listening to music and locking himself, his wife Preeti Vyyas begs to differ. “He must drink his chhaas while writing,” she quips, to which Amish chuckles.
Ashwin Sanghi, who wrote Chanakya’s Chant and the Krishna Key, admits to a few vagaries. “I must face east every time I write my books, because that’s where the sun rises and that is also where I draw my creative energies from,” he states. When the author was writing Chanakya’s Chant, a book set in two different eras that are set apart by thousands of years, Ashwin confesses to writing the historical part in the morning and the slime and irregularities in the modern day government in the evening, with a glass of whisky. “They were two parallel stories that I was writing. The story set in the historical period would be written in the ambience of light, chants playing in the backdrop along with the fragrance of agarbattis,” he adds.
Then there is Captain Vinod Nair, who only writes in a special leather book that has his family crest embossed on it. “I can only write in that journal and that too with a handcrafted Montblanc. Incidentally, no one is allowed to touch either of them,” explains the author of Pride of Lions.
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