Claire Hilaire asked Indu Sundaresan:

I am a big fan of your storytelling - you bring the events and characters to life seamlessly in every book. My question is: How do you decide what scenes/details are important to shaping the story and developing the characters?

Indu Sundaresan Claire, thank you! When you write a character's entire life history (as in THE TWENTIETH WIFE and THE FEAST OF ROSES), you do have to pick and choose which parts to set on scene, and which to cover in narration or skip over in time. In THE TWENTIETH WIFE, I thought, for example, that when her father flees from Persia, that was important to set on scene--it's dramatic, fraught with tension, and it introduces the family's circumstances as being dire, destitute, and the main character is born, of course.

The next chapter begins then eight years after this flight from Persia to India--and the contrast in circumstances is huge. Mehrunnisa's family is well-to-do, rich even, her father has a position in the Mughal courts, and Mehrunnisa is eight years old. It is the year Prince Salim marries for the first time, and the first time that Mehrunnisa sees the man she's going to marry, so again, the intervening eight years were not as important as this moment in time, because it sets up for the rest of the story.

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