2013 GH Finalist: Sonali Dev
Please welcome Sonali Dev to our blog today!! Sonali is a Single Title finalist with her entry “The Bollywood Bad Boy”.
A child bride grows up and finds out she’s married to the wrong man. Unfortunately the right man is her husband’s brother. And he’s only charming the pants off her to help his brother get rid of her.
My Writing Journey- A Series of Very Fortunate Events.
Ever since I finaled in the Golden Heart and got my book deal with Kensington, the question I get asked most is what my writing journey has been like. And boy do I love that question. Because it makes me feel like such a writer. And although I’ve written and loved to write for as long as I can remember, I still can’t believe that I am a writer and I have a contract to show for it. I even have the black and blue pinch marks to show for how insanely incredulous I am about the fact that my book actually comes out next year. And I will be able to photograph it on bookshelves and post the pictures to Facebook like a for-real-for-real writer.
As for the journey, I’d love to sound all brooding writer and say it’s been long and arduous, but really it’s been crazy fun, and in tracing it back, I see that it has been the perfect little medley of accidents. Starting off with the flu ten years ago, when in a horrific turn of events I ran out of things to read. I mean, what kind of person can be horizontal without a book in their hand? Like the distressed damsel I was, I turned helpless eyes upon my gallant husband and sent him off in his noble Honda to the library. And despite how terrified he is of the fiction section he did what any hero would do, he retrieved the very first book he found on the display shelves and then raced right back home bearing the fruits of his campaign- Catherine Coulter’s Rosehaven. I took one look at it, bared fangs I didn’t possess and went, “You’ve been married to me for gazillion years and you brought home a ROMANCE??”
Needless to say, I had never until then read a true blue romance. I’d just been a romance-hunter within mainstream fiction. Which is to say when I read, say, My Sister’s Keeper I read all of Campbell and Julia’s parts before I went back and read the rest of the story.
So, after I’d projected the heat of my fever into undeserved wrath and volleyed it at his unsuspecting head for a bit, I opened the dreaded book. And then didn’t put it down until I had consumed the last word, one sleepless night and several heart-to-belly zings later. You know that feeling of coming home after seven days of camping in the cold rain with sand pricking in your every crevice? And taking a hot shower and finding your warm bed? Bingo. I read everything Catherine Coulter had ever written and then discovered Lisa Kleypas, Julia Quinn, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, and on and on it went. I was hooked, lined and sunk.
Even as I consumed romances, I continued to write columns and blogs, and drive myself crazy trying to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be. In that phase when I was trying to decide between journalism school and an MFA, I got on the phone for my daily chat with my best friend. This was accident number two. It might help to mention that my BFF and I have been BFFs for, well, forever. We grew up in the same apartment building in Mumbai two decades ago and living on two different continents with an eleven hour time difference is no reason to break the habit of a daily chat.
She’s a movie producer (another thing I never ever get tired of saying). She had just completed an award-winning film and she had been reading through an endless supply of scripts that just weren’t exciting her. We’ve both always been film buffs and we both love commercial Bollywood films. After an awfully satisfying whine session about all the sucky films we’d recently watched (at this point I must share that the best part about Bollywood films is that they’re almost as much fun to make fun of as to watch). We wondered, in one of our signature moves of saying things simultaneously, why it was so hard to write a good film. At that moment the light bulb flashing over her head sparked all the way across eight thousand miles as she said, “You should write me a script!”
Instead of laughing it off, I actually had the arrogance to say, “You know, I’ve been reading these books (my newly discovered romances) and reading them is exactly like watching Bollywood films. They have the exact same structure.” (Yup, we’re just fancy enough to pepper our conversations with terms like ‘structure,’ ‘method,’ etcetera.)
That was it. I wrote her a script. It had a hero and a heroine (actually two pairs of them) and they were these gorgeous people at the lowest points in their lives, only they didn’t know it. And they had all these awful things keeping them apart, but the only way to fix these awful things was for them to heal each other and themselves, and then live happily ever after. There was much witty conversation and even some socially relevant issues. I didn’t know it then but I had just written my first romance!
The script never got made into a movie. The three scripts I wrote after that never went anywhere either. But boy were they fun to write. And once I had lived with the characters I had created there was no getting clean from that addiction. There was no more wondering about what kind of writer I wanted to be. I wanted to write stories. And since I had no idea which genre my stories fit into I figured I was writing literary fiction.
My first attempt at a novel was a rather complicated plot of four (yes, four) couples from four strata of Indian society with all sorts of mangled inner and outer worlds. I spent a year chiseling away at my genre-less story trying to make sense of it. I took writing classes, joined critique groups, really got into the whole Starbucks-and-wine writer thing. And then accident number three happened. In the form of Tuberculosis. When your friendly neighborhood TB came a-knocking and locked me up in the house for six weeks of quarantine, I thought, Yay! I can finally finish my book. But with all that coughing up my lungs, I needed something life-affirming, something escapist, something that went straight to my ovaries and made them cramp with hot emotion. I finally, finally, had to write what I loved to read. And I did. For all the trouble I’d had finishing my previous story, The Bollywood Bride, which had been revving in my brain for years, shot from my fingers with a force I couldn’t control. And except for minor hiccups, it didn’t stop until I had typed ‘The End’.
The number of slips and herculean pushes that it then took to spit, shine and sell it, is an entire different blog post. But my first complete manuscript, the one that will finally fulfill my lifelong dream of having a book on the shelves that people not related to me can buy, was the result of not just these but many many random accidents. I believe with all my heart that the universe gives you what you desire. But the trickster that the universe is, you never know which nudge will start the cascade of dominoes. All I can say is that you can help it along with an open mind and the readiness to jump on a bus as it goes by. Where you end up might be exactly where you’ve always wanted to be.
