7 life lessons I learnt while writing and promoting my first book
By: Janhavi Samant
Tags: Writers On Writing, Books, Book Recommendations, Writers Block, Novelists

Filmmaker Rohit Shetty (left), me, actress-writer Sonali Kulkarni and fimmaker-writer-columnist Paromita Vohra at the launch of Faaltugiri And Other Flashbacks

It’s exactly one year since my debut novel Faaltugiri And Other Flashbacks was published. And the past year has taught me more about life and writing than anything else before.

It was a lovely entertaining launch — much better than I expected — and the book has been showered with love and blessings of many known and unknown people ever since. There are people who have written to me to say their kids AND parents both loved it. Unknown people from my Dadar neighbourhood have just dropped in home to give live feedback on the book. Someone read the book and called to tell me that they were best friends with my aunt. There are some who found the book in a library and messaged me on Instagram. Someone wants me to start a Dadasaheb Phalke Heritage walking tour with it. Faaltugiri is truly a gift that keeps giving.

Needless to say, it has not been all smiles either. The experience of putting together the book — its prepping, editing, publishing and promotions — has been full of life and creative learnings for me. I am listing a few of them below. If you are a budding writer, some of these could be of use to you:

#1. Perfection is your enemy number one. Yes, we all want our work to be perfect. But it is the need for perfection that actually discourages many writers from putting their work out there for people to see. The fear of being judged a bad writer (read: any kind of artist) can be crippling. For every terrible writer writing one shitty novel after another and waxing eloquent about writing talent, there is an exceptional writer who is too diffident to share his or her work, because he/she feels it is NOT GOOD ENOUGH. I have been writing poetry in Marathi, Hindi and trying my hand at shayari for the last year or so, but I haven’t had the guts to share it with anyone yet for the same reason. I don’t know if I will have courage to share it… But I would still say that perfection is highly over-rated. Every story deserves to be told. And if you feel you have a story in you, please express and share it. In whatever format you feel works. There are enough people in the world who will enjoy your story and even help you improvise. When you share, your writing evolves and improves. So ditch thinking, start doing.

#2. Writing isolates you. Mostly it is just you and your writing. No matter how many people you are constructively discussing your work with. And it is easy to completely lose perspective on how the writing is going. Sometimes you try the same things over and over and feel like you are going in circles. This can get to be a negative spiral. In such phases, LEARN TO ASK FOR HELP. Find friends who understand storytelling who you can discuss stuff with. By friends, I don’t mean colleagues, spouses or BFFs or parents etc. “It’s fine/okay/great/works. Looks good.” This is not feedback. You need friends who can criticise constructively — who can understand where you are headed, what you want to achieve, hold your hand as you find your way towards that goal. Someone who is brutally honest about your writing but not in a way that demoralises you. “I went through your writing. It reads well but it is not clear what you are saying in so-and-so portions. Certain portions don’t seem to be working. The tone here is off. You may want to ditch/rewrite this whole chapter.” This is how good feedback sounds like.

#3. Understand your work for what it is. When I say this, I mean understand your writing effort in its spirit. Your writing is a labour of love, but only till you finish it. You are not writing for yourself. You are writing for an audience and it is important that you should know WHY SOMEONE SHOULD PICK UP YOUR BOOK or read your blog. What is in it for them? Once you are done with your writing, it is important to see your work objectively as an offering. Understand its spirit, flavour and proposition. Faaltugiri was meant to be a light chakna read — lighthearted, fun, irreverent and nostalgic — that would encourage people to tell stories of their own childhood. Understanding its spirit has helped me understand how to revise my writing again and again and then share this lightheartedness in my reading sessions with everyone.

#4. You will know what ghosting is. There are friends who will enthusiastically ask to look at your writing and then just refuse to reply to mails or calls when you ask for feedback. There are friends who never ever found the time for a full four years. There are paid editors who agree to edit the manuscript and do abso-fucking-lutely nothing for four months. When you ask for update after two extended deadlines, they say they don’t have the time to finish the project. There are publishers who agree to publish, say that their editor is taking a look at it and NOT do anything for a whole nine months. There are friends who will vouch to help you promote the book and then just disappear from your life. They will stop replying to messages or mails, answering calls or whatever. Even if Instagram tells you that they ate dahi wada at teatime or Whatsapp tells you they READ your messages. When they later meet you, these people will pretend like the last interaction never happened — like you never requested them for something and they never refused. Because really they didn’t actually refuse. There are friends who have contacts and resources but won’t extend them to you. There are friends who post ten times a day on social media but have not posted publicly about your book after promising to. This has been by far the most hurtful and humiliating lesson for me in the last two years. But one learns to let it go. The one thing I learnt from this experience is to BE MORE HELPFUL TO OTHERS. If someone asks you for help, it is because they think your opinion or favour is of some value to them. So whether it is to comment on someone’s upcoming manuscript, a stranger author’s book promos, moderating a panel discussion for a friend, editing someone’s blog, giving career guidance to friend’s kids, these days I find time to do all of this. Because this is what keeps the creative world going.

#5. Your world is full of kind and beautiful people. For every door that was closed on my face, five more opened up. The world is full of nice people eager to help you. The important lesson for me has been to understand that all one needs to do to connect with good people is to reach out. Our world is not restricted only to people we are born with, learn with or work with. It can encompass a lot of other meaningful spiritual connections. There are friends who pored painstakingly over my manuscript to point flaws in them, celebrities who travelled across town to launch my book, friends who opened up their homes, libraries and shops to host reading sessions for me, friends who recommended me for public panel discussions. it has taught me: DO NOT BE AFRAID TO ASK FOR HELP AND TAKE HELP WHEN OFFERED NICELY. Look for the good in your own world.

#6. Make sure everyone pays for their copy of your book. This is not a matter of money. It is a matter of principle. A true friend would take pride in buying an autographed copy, even though you may want to give it for free. In the case of Faaltugiri, apart from reviewers whose opinions I genuinely cared about or institutions that hosted my reading sessions, I haven’t given a single copy free to anyone. My mom, sister and husband were the first to buy their copies. And they are proud to do so.

My experience with Faaltugiri And Other Flashbacks has taught me that every story deserves to be told

#7. Believe that your story deserves to be told. Till my friend Preeti Vyas of Fun OK Please Publishing agreed, Faaltugiri And Other Flashbacks was rejected by at least a dozen publishing houses over a span of five years. There have even been editors who refused to work on it. Those years were full of self-doubt. Why am I even working on this? No one is interested in this. Who cares for the story of a small girl living in Dadar in the 80s? Every time a publisher rejected the manuscript, I would go into a spiral of self-doubt. Then a few months later, a friend or family member would ask, “Arre what happened to that funny book you were writing? When is it releasing?” And that would make me take a re-look at the manuscript. I would find some patches terrible and re-write them. Then add some bits. Then again send it to someone who would then ghost me. The whole cycle would start again. The only thing that kept me going in this spiral of self-doubt was believing that this story deserved to be told. Faaltugiri And Other Flashbacks is not a success story or any such thing. Far from it. But I know for sure that it would not be wherever it is if I had not persisted with or believed in it.

Faaltugiri is a fun book about growing up in Bombay in the 80s. If you haven’t read it yet, pick it up from http://bit.ly/faaltugiri_amazon