Weekly Notes - Week 1 - Zero banana-liking dogs found
I’ve started writing weekly notes after being inspired by Ankur, Tanvi, and Abhinav at my first-ever IndieWeb Club meetup in Bangalore a few weeks ago. While I won’t be able to share updates about my work as a marketing leader at Moxo.com, I will be sharing a lot about everything else.
I’ve started work on a novella in my spare time, and like all overly ambitious people, I’ve decided that the novella will be a part of a series of four others; and that they’ll all share the same opening scene, from which each one will break into different directions via different characters.
In one of his recent weekly notes, Ankur was asking what writers do “between getting a promising idea for a story and starting to type out their first lines?” For me, it’s changed over the years. I figure out the characters, plot, arcs, and subtext, and then start work on the setting. In the case of my current novella, which is based on talking dogs in Koramangala, I am doing all that while working on world-building in parallel whenever ideas strike. My goal is to start writing the book in a few days, which is 27th Oct, a Monday, at around 8AM. I hope I shall be done with pre-production by then.
A younger version of me used to just dive into writing without any of the pre-production work I’ve listed above, and the results were disastrous. I’ve started taking a more mindful approach these days, and the difference is obvious: more finished projects. Writers often skip on the pre-production because there’s no money involved (unlike a film shoot). They tell themselves that it’s ok if you don’t have a script and a proper plan; you can figure it out on the page, mid sentence.
This does not work out for part-time writers because our time and energy for our fiction writing are limited, so if we don’t register success and see traction early on, we will lose hope, abandon the idea, and then go start making reels on Instagram.
Hitting the sheets (of your Google Doc) with a reasonable amount of pre-production ensures that your first ten or twenty pages are of agreeable quality; you’ll produce relatable characters in wholesome settings that present compelling conflict. You’ll end up building such a nice world that you’ll automatically have the momentum to keep going; because your plan is a good one, and your progress is tangible and reasonable, and following through is easy since you know where you’re headed. Pre-production produces good early success, which then generates easy motivation to keep pushing ahead.
Outside the writing of fiction, I’ve come down to Coimbatore to celebrate Diwali with my parents and my brother. In the past, Coimbatore used to be famous for manufacturing, cotton spinning mills, and healthcare. These days, I hear it's now also famous for old age homes and a religious guy in the outskirts who claims to be really religious. Fun fact: Coimbatore, while being a lovely city, with good well-mannered people and even better food, now has a traffic problem that’s as bad (if not worse) than Bangalore. I don’t think we can let Bangalore hold a monopoly on this traffic jokes anymore, its becoming a tier-1 India issue.
Here’s what I’m currently reading and watching this week.
I’m completing Kitchen Confidential, the book on the inner workings of the restaurant industry that got Anthony Bourdain one of the best jobs that the media industry has ever produced. I first heard about Mr.Bourdain in the opening joke of ‘Sticks and stones’, a comedy special by Dave Chappelle. I read a lot about him, watched a few episodes of his travel show (available on YT) and then found his book. I’m a vegetarian, and Anthony says that “Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.” Despite this, I’m enjoying the book a little too much. Anthony’s writing style is exemplary: fast, witty, elegant, and incredibly colourful with metaphors and wild anecdotes. It sort of reminds me of Jeremy Clarkson’s brilliant voice-overs, but only faster, funnier, and more insightful. It is the kind of non-fiction people more people should when they want to “try non-fiction”, instead they go buy ‘Atomic habit’s and then wonder why they hate books (I’m a big AH fan, its just not something you read for pleasure”.
I’m also reading “Fifteen Dogs” by Andre Alexis, which is a novel about stray dogs that gain intelligence overnight.
How to increase your surface area of luck
A deep dive into Earnest Hemmingw’s writing style and influences
And some reading on the woman who became Japan’s new leader this week. Sanae Takaichi is a fascinating person, not only because she’s Japan’s first female PM, but because of many other things. She served as Minister of State for Youth Affairs and Gender Equality, despite her record of opposing women becoming emperor, opposing same-sex marriage, supporting traditional family units, and opposing legislation for married couples to keep separate surnames :)