BENGALURU : Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan knew she wanted to be a writer at the age of 16. Her first book came out of a her popular blog, Compulsive Confessions, and there was no looking back since then. She has to her credit more than five books and her latest book, The One Who Had Two Lives, is the second book in her Girls Of The Mahabharata series. Excerpts from an interview with CE:
What was your trigger for writing Girls Of The Mahabharata: The One Who Had Two Lives?
I’ve loved writing about young women. I don’t think the concerns of women change much, whether they were born in 1500 BC or 2000 AD. I imagine the larger questions are the same: Who will love me? What shall I do with my life? Why do I want different things from my parents? When I began writing the Girls Of The Mahabharata series (starting with Satyavati) I imagined each book would offer an accurate reflection of that specific character’s life—orphaned Satyavati or oldest sister Amba or transman Shikhandi.
I also started to think a lot about gender and sexuality. The lines are blurred in this book, so everything’s very fluid. I have two trans characters, two deep friendships and easy interactions around sexuality. I think in India’s Vedic times we were a lot less concerned about who slept with whom than we are today.
Have you always seen yourself as a writer?
Yes! I used to have these notebooks which I carried to school—separate from school work—and if I was getting very bored in class I’d invent stories and write them down. I was very interested in the different forms of storytelling. I remember at age eight, I realised I could record my voice onto our old tape deck and then I invented this whole family and narrated their lives. It was sort of like a radio play. By about age sixteen, after thinking of a number of careers—veterinarian mainly—I realised I couldn’t fight it any more, I was going to be a writer.
What has been your inspiration as a writer?
The books I read, the music I listen to, the conversations I have with other people. I’ll be making idle chit-chat and then something will go “ping!” inside my head and it’ll settle into my next book. I write a lot as well. I send out a mostly weekly newsletter, filled with updates about my life. I tweet, I write articles, I take photos and add long captions, it’s all practise towards my larger body of work.
Does your writing draw influence from vernacular books?
I’m, unfortunately, almost entirely monolingual. My spoken Hindi is not bad, having grown up in Delhi, and I can understand a smattering of Telugu because I spoke it in my early years, but absolutely no Malayalam or any other Indian languages. As a result, I read only in English—and vernacular books in translation.
With the digitisation of books, have you moved to reading books on screen or do you prefer the old-fashioned books?
Books are books. I have an extensive personal library which I love, filled with “real” books, and I have a Kindle which I also love. When I’m travelling, my Kindle is my lifesaver, but when I’m in Delhi, I love to curl up with a book.
What is the process you undergo while writing?
I try to stick to word count goals daily—usually about 1,500 words—and a lot of my writing gets done between 4pm and 7pm. I like having music on in the background, something instrumental, jazzy or ambient. The rest is mostly random, what sort of day I’m having (I try not to schedule lunch dates because then I’m too mentally tired by 4pm to do anything), or whether I have freelance deadlines which also eat into a fraction of my writing day. When I do get started, I can go pretty fast, because I’ve been thinking of my book inside my head.
How difficult or easy is it to get published? Have you had to modify or change the content of your book for it to get published?
I first got published ten years ago, so a lot of things have changed since then. For me, I got my first book contract because of my blog, which was popular then, and since that book did well, I’ve been quite lucky to find publishers again.
With one of my young adult books, then called Confessions of a Listmaniac (republished as The Life and Times of Layla the Ordinary) I was told to change a scene where the character had a hangover, and another one where a couple is making out, so it would fly past the teachers who checked for these things. But when Penguin picked it up, I got to put the chapters back the way they were. I remember being a teenager and how all those things were very real to us.
Who’s your first reader? And who are your biggest critics?
My first reader is my husband, who offers great feedback each time. As for my biggest critics, I know I have loads on the internet, sometimes I stumble upon a bunch of them discussing my books and how terrible they are. Maybe I’m hiding from them because they have left me alone for the last couple of years.
Do you think marketing plays an integral role in the success of a book?
All writers have to be excellent salespeople these days as well. Sure, some books will surprise you by slipping through the net and doing amazingly well just by word-of-mouth, but I can guarantee that all the books you’re seeing are all visible to you because of a marketing campaign.