Writing this novel; my inspirations, timeframes, and the work involved

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Writing this novel; my inspirations, timeframes, and the work involved

Publish Day (let’s call it P-Day) draws closer. I’m now in that stage where I need to spend a week or so getting the text formatted while the cover is being designed.

I want to maintain a record of this process. (This is not me trying to pass off my ‘process’ as the work of some kind of writing guru. I want a diary and I’m too lazy to maintain a paper journal).

I’m currently sitting on 82,500 words typed out in text files on Google Drive, each file a chapter. About 10,000 of these words are outside the main narrative arc. I’ve achieved this by writing every Saturday. My first draft deadline was in December (met) and my third draft in March (again, met).

I am faster than I expected to be but slower than I need to be. If I wrote 500 words a day I’d have this done a lot earlier.

To do:

Change the name of the company in the story if about (a Ctr+F operation; I’ve been using a placeholder)
Append a few details to the text outside the main narrative arc to make it more relevant
Get a cover done
Do the layout
Publish review copies
Create a marketing plan for the book
Launch on Amazon with a few reviews
Await disappointment

Timeline for the above: July – that’s two months of work left. My April deadline has been pushed back, the only timeframe error I’ve made since 2015. Dammit.

I started working this novel around July, 2015. I was had run off to Thailand to disconnect, and the moment I switched my phone off I started to realize how dependent I was, as a human being, on Facebook and Whatsapp and Instagram. It was as if I could barely enjoy an experience without recording it somehow. I was reading Dave Egger’s The Circle on that trip, and it really opened my eyes to how much data I was putting out there for anyone to consume.

When I came back to Sri Lanka, I ended up at a startup event. I was the Editor of Readme.lk at the time, so covering events like these were part of the day’s work. Entrepreneurs entrepreneur’d, trying to sell the crowd on the Next Big Thing. Investors stalked the grounds. They all had a limited time to hook each other, so every time two people met, they’d sort of size each other up, trying to see how important the other person was. The moment they pulled someone unimportant their eyes would glaze over and they’d excuse themselves.

Rude, I know, but we all seem to do this. I thought it would save a great deal of time if everyone had numbers on their heads showing exactly how important they were. When I got back to office, I talked to Enosh (co-founder of Readme, and my boss) about the idea. We both thought it cool, and just out of the blue, I said ‘I’m going to write this story.’

I didn’t. Instead, I quit my job and joined WSO2, a middleware company. WSO2 is widely regarded as one of the coolest places you can work in tech in Sri Lanka, and it also gave me a ton of work to do. Enough that I forgot the story.

Until I ended up working on the Experian case study.

Some call Experian a credit score checking service, but that would perhaps be an injustice: this company, which now counts some 17,000 people among its employees, is the credit information company. Day in and day out, customers arrive at Experian looking not only for credit reports, but for financial advice. Experian, analyzing their spending patterns and the ripple effects of those, is in a position to tell customers what to buy, what cards to keep, how to handle their bank accounts and loans, and a myriad of other details.

That’s literally something I wrote for the WSO2 blog. Experian is a giant of a company that uses incredible amounts of data to analyze people’s credit scores. We don’t have credit scoring here in Sri Lanka, but in countries that do, credit is a big thing; if you have bad credit, you could be denied a loan, your utility bills could be higher – life basically gets pretty unpleasant.

The whole thing just clicked. Algorithms, and the effect they have on our lives. Everything from Facebook’s Newsfeed to Experian’s credit scoring.

I started writing this novel as a biography of a (fake) man, using the style I was familiar with as a journalist. However, that exhausted itself after a couple of thousand words. There were too many problems with weaving in the plot. I’m not Walter Isaacson.

I then rewrote it as a third-person story told by four people. One, the CEO of this company, Numbercorp. Two, someone at the bottom end of the bootheel. Three, someone in Sri Lanka watching the social takeover. Four, an outcast, a beggar-philosopher outside the system. I reckoned I could do a Demosthenes like Orson Scott Card did in Speaker for the Dead.

Didn’t work. I’m still not at a level where I can coherently pull off four narratives and weave them together. I had enough trouble weaving one.

Things finally started working out when I took a leaf out of The Circle and cast a new employee- this one had a bit of a journalism background – going to work in a Valley company. I read a few books to help me understand the style; among the most useful was Dan Lyon’s Disrupted, a scathing expose of Hubspot and the Silicon Valley lifestyle by a disgruntled journalist (Lyons went on to write the famous Silicon Valley show). The other was Antonio Garcia Martinez’s Chaos Monkeys. Both of these are muckracking books, and I knew I wanted to write in that style.

Over the next two years, I’d see the premise validated again and again. Colomboscope 2016 displayed an app that triangulated Instagrammers on Google Maps using their location data. And China announced that they were going to start scoring citizens.

Of course, no idea exists in a vacuum. I had a brief conversation with author Cory Doctorow that made it pretty clear that I wasn’t the only one exploring this space – he’s touched it as far back as 2000, there’s Lauren McLaughlin’s

SCORED and then there’s Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. My angle is different, but we clearly have an obsession with human quantification. And as NYT points out, the genre is surging right now.