Why We Tell Stories

The Story of My First Novel

2016: the year I discovered the importance of storytelling.

I spent most of 2016 writing my first novel, Slip Inside This House. It had obvious literary ambitions and ostensibly attempted to be experimental with structure and style. Most of it, for example, was dialogue. There was next to no descriptive writing. A reader was meant to merely float through a hundred-and-twenty montages little longer than a couple of pages each, windows into the lives of five twenty-something friends employed in the mid-2010s startup ecosystem of Mumbai. And by the end of it, s/he was to feel like s/he’d experienced a year in the lives of these friends. I worked very hard on it. Found myself an agent, who found me a publisher, who found me an editor. A year later, exhausted by the experience, I found my novel out there: but without a marketing budget, without a marketing plan, without a writer willing to publicly stand by it. It stood alone in an uncaring world, meeting a fate most novels by unknown writers meet: oblivion. 

Before 2020, I told most around me (and myself) that 2016 was the defining year of my life. And in many ways, it was. I experienced the bundling of a relationship, followed by an overall cleaning up of my act: much-needed weight-loss and what-not, and the completion of my first published novel. My career was starting to take on a trajectory that I could describe like a good story: with motivation, conflict, and resolution. I was decidedly different at the start of 2017 vs. the start of 2016. I hadn’t just changed, I had ‘grown’. 

At least, that was my narrative. See, most of all, 2016 was the year I understood the importance of stories. There was, of course, the story I told in Slip Inside This House. Even before it drifted into oblivion, when it was clear to me that I hadn’t written a smash hit, I did believe I had written something that could comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, despite how self-important that sounds. Even if I was wrong about that, I had at least given a snapshot of a scene to inquisitive outsiders. I told myself on my way to selling t-shirts at one of the more successful startups from the scene that inspired the book. And in providing that snapshot, I had told the story of the people I saw around me, their motivations, their fears and insecurities, their triumphs. And of course, I had given myself some comfort while doing so. 

Why I wrote.

In George Orwell’s classic essay Why I Write, he speaks of the four primary motivations of writers: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. All four were heavily represented in my reasons for writing SITH. For one, I wanted to tell a story I believed only I could tell, and in doing so exorcise some of my own demons. Two, I wanted to tell it in a particular style, because it’s a style I believed the novel, as an artform, ‘should’ take, another sign of my sheer egoism. Three, I wanted to preserve a snapshot of an era for eternity because of my belief that it was an important time in an important place that nobody was really chronicling. And four, I wanted my prose to change the world: I wanted those around me (and myself) to grow up, and believed an unflinching portrayal of the arrested childhood of the twenty-something men and women (but mostly men) around me would be read, and encourage them (and myself) to behave more responsibly. 

Not much of this happened, truth be told, except for the exorcising of personal demons, because the book never reached the right hands. I spent no time marketing it. In fact, I was almost apologetic for having written it, way too eager to accept criticism from well-intentioned friends who complained about its length, its style, its subject matter, despite not having read it. I was coy in accepting the praise of the few that did read the book, questioning their motivations: maybe they’re just saying they loved it when in fact they just love me, did they even read it the whole way through, etc. It’s impossible to plug something you don’t stand for; why would I encourage people to read a book that caused me embarrassment?

I concluded, unfortunately, that if writing a novel was an egotistical act, promoting it was downright megalomaniacal. At least if it rotted in obscurity, I could go on with the business of being a normal person who leads business operations and strategy at a startup that actually gives people useful things they need, as opposed to drab, boring, too-long stories about miserable, self-important twenty-somethings. It’s a nobler life, a more responsible one: one with a healthy, ever-growing paycheque earned by delivering to people an essential commodity, clothing. 

But the fact is, I was scared. What if those few (exactly two) friends were right? What if it was unreadable drivel, despite it being read by an editor, a publisher, and many others other than those two friends. Will people laugh at the dryness of its prose? Its lack of structure? Its amateurishness? Will people think it self-indulgent? Will they consider its author a moron who is also at the same time too self-important to even recognise his own idiocy? At least with music, I knew I had a good ear, so releasing music for public consumption was easy. With a novel, you can easily convince yourself that the feedback of two people who have never published their own works is more important than any other voice in the room, especially your own. So I didn’t market it.

Why I write.

The good thing is, this story has a happy ending. I’m speaking to you now, aren’t I? Until 2020, the most important year of my life was 2016. 2020 has been, for me, like for countless others, the most significant year of my life. In many ways, it’s for the opposite reasons: weight-gain, personal stagnation, professional failure, anxiety and uncertainty. But I’m reminded again of the importance of stories.

In my retelling of 2016 to my friends, I always talk about the upswing. I never present the balanced view a good narrative needs. The narrative I’m presenting here is a much more honest one. The novel I wrote, though published, failed. It failed not because it was bad, but because its author failed it. Its author failed it because of his insecurities, and because he worked with the wrong people and listened to the wrong friends. He worked with the wrong people because he craved the social approval that came with being a published writer, even if it meant losing control of the publishing process. He listened to the wrong friends because he was fine-tuned to listening to advice that painted his artistic efforts negatively, perhaps because he was fine-tuned to looking at artistic efforts in general negatively, in a culture that played up the importance of Engineering and played down the importance of the Arts. 

The fact is, the only way to get read is by working at least as hard at promotion as one does on writing. It’s much easier to paint the market as being as impenetrable as the prose it’s intended to consume than it is to put one’s work out there, prone to circling vultures or worse, to nobody. But the good news is I’m speaking to you now. Now, you’re reading this. It’s taken me five years, but I can say now, unequivocally, that my story matters, that my stories matter, and that I want people to hear them.

Our narratives matter. They aren’t just meant for hangouts with friends or open mics. Our daily lives are governed by our narratives. There’s a strong anthropological case to be made that the reason H. sapiens sapiens developed to be the predominant hominin species, is because of our  ability to tell stories. It’s because we could tell each other stories that we could point to the land behind the big rock and say there’s danger there, I know because I just saw the craziest thing. It’s why we could face unimaginable odds as we roamed to the corners of the world, through drought and sleet, through tundra and desert. It’s why we could codify myths that helped us tell our kids why stabbing strangers would land them in a world of pain. And it’s why we sit in front of our screens at the end of a miserable year, and forget, for just a moment, that any of it happened. Stories give comfort to the afflicted. And when necessary, they afflict the comfortable. 

Every storyteller is carrying on a rich tradition that ensured the survival of this species. Every story is a vestige of the original story of human survival against the odds. I’m not writing this to tell you to buy Slip Inside This House. I’m writing this to say that even this story: the story of my previous five years spent telling stories, starting with the initial failure of my first novel, is a vestige of that original story of what it means to be human. Everything I do at Stranger Fiction will be an effort to share stories that move me. And I hope that every day, even if just for a moment, I can have you sitting in front of your screen, even if it’s at the end of a year as wretched as this one, and forget any of it ever happened.