Dear Pawan, can you give us more insight into Coinman. Do you think reading a lot of books, subdues the original style of a writer?

Pawan Mishra Hi Vadwlas - that's a great question about the style of a writer. But first about Coinman :)

I started on Coinman in 2003 as a creative writing pursuit resulting from someone's request for a story about his colleague who had a quirk that had plagued the office they worked for. As I started writing, I realized that the subject needed a more elaborate treatment -- it thus turned into a full length novel. It was completed in 2007 but I hadn't planned to publish it until early 2015.

At the center of the novel is a small office in a small city in North India. The office has a mammoth gossiping culture -- where most of the gossips are around invented stories about Coinman, a nonconformist whose peculiar quirk irritates them alike. It seems all fine until they plan to get rid of the issue.

Having spent first 20 years of my life in the small town of Aligarh in UP, I had a privilege of seeing life in a small city very closely. Wandering through every possible narrow street in the city and interacting with every possible type of character opened up a beautiful inner world in my mind that found a way to open itself through this book.

I hope this is enough without revealing the plot much :)

Now to your other question -- but a small disclaimer first. It may be a subject of a good debate and there is no black & white answer -- but this is what I have experienced.

When you start reading, you get influenced a lot by what you are reading. First comes the genre. If you keep reading across genres, over years your true love starts showing -- that is, you keep getting inclined towards certain genre(s) that appeal to you more particularly. Then you end up picking more books in that genre. It's after this point that you start getting influenced by individual styles of authors. You feel like your style is getting modified too -- by way of appreciation for styles of certain authors -- and you are right. The solution is -- keep reading more and more. And in the end, you are so used to reading and looking at authors' styles objectively that you can pretty much see them very isolated from your own.

In short -- when we start reading/ thinking, our style is not formed yet. So when we read something that has extraordinary style, we get overly influenced, and the style may reflect in our writing. But when we keep reading, lot and lot and lot more, the style continuously forms by maturing itself at every point -- eventually to a point where you see it as you see 2+2=4.

Hope that helps.

flag