Saurabh Dashora's Blog, page 3

What makes Saturn’s largest moon Titan interesting?

Isn’t that a wonderful sight? Gave me the goose-bumps when I first came across images from this strange world in our very own friendly neighborhood. Well, technically it is still a billion miles from Earth but considering the vast distances quite common in the Universe, a billion miles looks like next door.

When I first saw these beautiful images and artworks on Titan, I decided to make this hazy orange moon as the setting for my debut novel Starship Samudram. I researched extensively on the specialty of Titan and found these fascinating facts:

Titan is the largest moon of the second largest gas-giant (i.e. Saturn) in our Solar System.
The temperature on Titan is 270 points below 0. That would be devilishly cold, I suppose.
Methane, the gas that is usually found in marshlands on Earth, exists on Titan in liquid form.
There is a methane-cycle on Titan similar to the water-cycle on Titan. Yes, you are right! Methane actually rains on this strange world, flows in streams, and pretty much does what water does on Earth. In that sense, scientists have often found Titan quite similar to Earth.
Owing to this methane-cycle, there are vast lakes of liquid methane on Titan’s surface. One of the prominent lakes Ligeia Mare has a surface area of 126,000 square kilometers and a shoreline that extends to 2000 kilometers.
Saturn looms in Titan’s skies, much larger than the sun in our skies on Earth and probably resulting in some breathtaking views. Imagine a penthouse overlooking Ligeia Mare with Saturn rising on horizon. Oh the possibilities!
Titan is locked in a geo-synchronous orbit around Saturn. Meaning that the same side will always be facing Saturn. That’s why those awe-inspiring sights!
The gravity on Titan is 1/7th of Earth. So, you can probably fly on Titan if you jump from a mountain. That is, until you fall in some hydrocarbon infested lake and drown because of lake of density.

One of my primary goals while writing Starship Samudram was to speculate on how it might be for the first human explorers to arrive on Titan. What will they see and feel? What kind of obstacles they might face—natural and psychological? Of course, all of this with a seasoning of fiction and mystery.

I am sure there are many more mysteries about Titan, something which I hope to explore in the sequel to Starship Samudram. But, what do you think about this amazing world in the comments section below? Should mankind even try to visit it?

If you want to read my take about Titan’s eco-system, get your copy of Starship Samudram today.

How many drafts are enough?

As promised last time, today I’m going to talk about the various drafts involved in writing a novel.  At-least, I will try to share my opinion about what I feel about the tricky question that faces every author.  How many drafts are enough?

So let’s start from the beginning and take this through



First Draft


Let me say upfront that First Draft is almost equivalent to shit.



Deep silence…



Well, maybe that was too harsh.  But what could I say when the great Ernest Hemingway has said “First draft of everything is shit“.  Technically speaking, it’s not as bad but first drafts are like the clay from which the true sculpture is crafted.  Even though the clay is nothing but an incoherent mess but without it no good sculpture can be made.



First Drafts are the first connection to the parallel world where stories live.  It is like creating something out of nothing.  What I think is that one should not get discouraged if things don’t work out well enough in the first draft or if the writing sometimes looks like an utter mess.  Just keep writing and keep aiming to finish the story when you feel dejected in the midst of writing the first draft.  Without the first draft, there can be no second draft or the third draft.  That is what I did with Starship Samudram even though I sometimes felt that it was not going as planned.



Second Draft


From my limited experience, I feel that second drafts are THE most important thing in the whole process of writing.  It is where the seemingly incoherent first draft takes on a shape and form that might be appealing to the readers.  This is where you cut out the weeds, re-arrange the plants, and trim them or grow them to make it better.  This is where you write the real story.



If one has written the First Draft well enough then by the time the Second Draft starts, the characters will be almost like real people talking to you.  Leverage that.  Think about how the characters in the novel can interact with each other better, what is their depth, what have they experienced in this novel, and above all else, think about how you can improve it or make it more engaging for the readers.  Can you re-arrange the scenes to make it more impactful?  Can you cut down some characters or add certain new ones that might make more sense to the story?



The first draft of Starship Samudram was only 95K words.  However, when I read my first draft from cover-to-cover, I could see so much potential for backstory, character interactions, re-structuring, and world building that I started re-writing everything.  The second draft ended with almost 140K words.  It was a dramatic increase of almost 50K words and I could say that none of that was repeated stuff.  However, for some cases, it might also mean reducing the words and making the novel tighter.



Third Draft


For me, this is the editing phase.  The careful trimming of content that does not impact the story but improves the writing further.  This is where I normally try to tackle the weeds called adverbs, passive voice, typos and spellings that inadvertently creep into your initial drafts no matter how hard you try.  Important thing is that you don’t change the story or any scenes in the third draft.  You only work with what you already have.  Because if you start changing stuff, you might get into a vicious cycle where you keep re-inventing the same story in different ways and not able to finish anything.  Trust your work but only try to improve it in this draft and I think you’ll be good.



Fourth Draft


Is there even a Fourth Draft?



Yes, there might be.  There might also be a 5th, 6th, 7th draft or as many as a writer believes is required to complete the work.  But I feel they are more of the same and depends on how unsure a writer is about his work.  For me, fourth draft only consists of corrections.  When I completed the second draft for Starship Samudram, I believed it was a great story and moreover, it was complete.



I gave it to my test readers even while I worked on improvements in the third draft.  Only thing I wanted from my test readers was whether they liked the story and whether they felt it made sense.  I didn’t expect them to treat it like a literature masterpiece but atleast tell me whether it was interesting enough to read.  Fourth Draft for me was to incorporate their suggestions if any or improve certain aspects of my work that I might’ve noticed during the couple of months it takes to reach from third draft to the fourth draft.



Now, all this does not mean that you can’t write with lesser number of drafts.  But, this appears to me as the most logical number of drafts.  However, as I gain more experience as a writer I might be able to finish something in two drafts.  It also depends on the kind of story you are writing.  Grand sci-fi with a huge number of characters might need a lot of pruning and re-structuring.  Other types of stories might not.  It all depends on the author in the end but the above can act as a rough blueprint.



Let me know what you feel about this topic and what is the optimum number of drafts you feel or have tried out in the past.

The journey of Starship Samudram

Starship Samudram will always be very close to my heart. It doesn’t matter how it performs or how successful it becomes on the usual benchmarks used to judge books. It is like that first job which one always remembers, no matter how mundane it was.

The idea for Starship Samudram was in the making from several sources—some quite obvious while others buried deep in the subconscious. The subconscious is a great tool for a writer. Because that is where you channel for ideas, concepts, and world building.

However, for the purpose of retrospection, the very first germ of an idea that formed the backbone for Starship Samudram lies in a television programme about the Cassini mission to Titan and the speculations made about the life and climate on Titan. Even though hardly anything from that programme might have made its way in the story, but it still paved the way for the initial world-building.

The second most potent inspiration for Starship Samudram could be traced to one image that was sort of printed in my mind and didn’t leave throughout the writing of the book. It came automatically in one of those deep thinking sessions that most authors would know about. Before any of the plot, characters, back-story or any fancy thing there was only this one image in my mind that I would call as the true inspiration for Starship Samudram. An astronaut standing on a cliff and looking over the horizon to see nothing but Saturn looming in the sky. How insignificant he would be feel in that moment? How will it even feel to be on this strange world in our own solar system where methane rained instead of water and mighty Saturn covered the skies rather than the familiar sight of sun?

Once I was certain that the setting of the novel should be Titan, then the long process of research started. It started with research about the technology currently available for space exploration, how agencies like NASA and ESA think about the various planets in our solar system, and how much do we know about Titan and the other places in our fascinating solar system. It took almost 3-4 months of reading up stuff, taking notes, and basically trying to build a world where the story and the characters can exist.

Now that I think back, I can see that the story already existed. The characters already lived and breathed in a parallel world. I was merely trying to write about them, channeling thoughts through a subconscious connection. The better the connection, the better the writing will turn out to be. When you write a book, a phase comes when writing starts to flow naturally rather than you thinking about what to write. That phase is the most rewarding because in those moments, the characters start talking to you rather than the other way round.

After the research phase, it took almost 3 months to write the first draft, which finally became the second draft after a complete re-write over the next 2 months. Then, came the inevitable 3rd draft, which was a ton of corrections, structure, and minor tweaks here and then. Lastly, the fourth draft was more of a self-reading to see how I can see this story from the eyes of the reader and not as the author.

In the next post, I will talk about the various drafts involved in the writing process and the role of each stage.

What makes me write?

My today’s post would be focused on writing and what prompts a seemingly normal and happy man like me to take this path.

Let me start off by saying that writing is for you only if you are willing to punish yourself for days on end, pick fights with your immediate companions, and be in a generally gloomy mood to put something on paper while at the same time aware that probably, not a single person is going to read the stuff.  Whew, that’s dark I suppose.

So you might be wondering as to what prompted me to write.  Well, the answer is simple and yet, surprising.  I write because somehow the words trying to push their way out of my brain inflict more pain as compared to the pain mentioned above.  It can possibly be compared to an ailment where for some reason, you can’t stop the ideas from popping into your head and begging to be heard and reacted upon.  Each writer may have his/her own motivation but for me, this is the most important thing.

Satisfaction at seeing the idea take shape on paper and slowly grow, evolve, and ultimately out-reach your own limitations is a wonderful feeling.  It is like looking into another parallel world and finding things that only you know about.  But that’s called imagination or day-dreaming depending on whom you ask.  What makes fiction writers different is their motivation to bring that imagination or day-dreams out of that hypothetical parallel world into this world and write about it. 

And this feeling of bringing and sharing something unknown with the world (even though no one might be interested) outweighs the cons of writing.  When I start on a new story, the feeling is a little shy and hesitates to find its voice.  But as I prod it gently and give it the right attention, it grows until all my waking time is filled with the voice of this feeling. 

Normally, it only stops when everything is put on paper and there is no more to be done but some-times there is a monster that overcomes the feeling.  A monster that goes by the name of Writer’s Block.  More on that in later posts.

Hope you enjoyed this post. In my next post, I will talk about my debut-novel Starship Samudram and how it came to exist.