Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s debut novel You Are Here is out in bookstores this week. “The Compulsive Confessor” speaks about the transition from being a popular blogger to a novelist.
“Everyone wants to know about how you turn a blog into something that gets published and sold in bookstores. There’s one simple answer: you don’t. Writers are writers. Before the blog, we journal. I still carry around a notebook for commutes and things, so I can get things down when I think of them.”
- from a recent post on The Compulsive Confessor
(http://thecompulsiveconfessor.blogspot.com)
This is something I have to regularly explain to people. The fact is, long before I started blogging — as far back as I can remember, actually — I’ve been writing things in a little notebook. As a child, I would write and make simple little drawings as well. It’s something that came naturally to me.
I started blogging in June 2004 and it came out of my boredom with the kind of work I was doing. I had just started working as an intern with an afternoon tabloid and had been relegated to that most mundane of job descriptions —putting together the TV-listings page. So I began filling the hours by writing short posts about my personal life. Unfortunately, I was overenthusiastic and indiscreet — I wrote about my office and colleagues and that got me in trouble. So I began a new, anonymous blog —The Compulsive Confessor —and started all over again, having decided that I wouldn’t write about my work any more.
TCC began as a constant search for self, to see where my life was at a given point in time. It was empowering to have an online presence, to get the occasional comment from someone I didn’t know, who had just happened to stumble onto my blog: it gave me a rush. But the real tipping point came when I happened to write a post detailing a break-up. Writing the post had been a form of catharsis, a sort of self-therapy for me, but it led to an unexpected surge in readership, with lots of people writing in and commenting that they enjoyed what I had written or that they could relate to it. This eventually helped define the tone and identity of the blog as well — I realised that people liked the way I wrote about certain things, and so I built on that.
Many people assume that I started thinking about writing a book only after the blog became popular, but that isn’t the case. Actually I had had a book — this book — in my head since at least class 11. Not all the details but the basic theme: I wanted to write something about the experiences of our generation of globalised, 21st century urban Indian youngsters, who had English as their first language. There was hardly any writing of that sort around at the time. So, years later, when publishers (having read the blog) got in touch with me and asked if I had an idea for a book, I was ready. That said, I didn’t want to commit myself before I had sorted things out in my head, so I took two weeks off from work and spent that entire time writing out the first half of the book. It was only after I had finished that I got back in touch with the publishers and worked out the details.
Writing a book was, of course, a different challenge from blogging. The second half of You Are Here took me a year to finish. I had to compartmentalise my writing — while the blog posts would be written in the morning, I would work on the book at night, sometimes even after 1 am, when I was back home after partying. There were times when the book became too journal-like, too blog-like, and I had to guard against that.
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The edit took another year and there were times during this process when I felt like banging my head against the wall. As you know, one of the advantages of blogging is that it allows you to self-publish, immediately, whenever you feel like it. But the book was a whole different matter — though I can see now that it has improved, become more compact after editing, there were times when I got very impatient. I wanted to see it on the shelves as soon as possible!
Now it’s finally out, two years after I finished writing it. One offshoot of the time-lag is that the book is out of my system now — the characters have left me. In fact, sometimes, when people who are reading it now mention a passage to me, I go, “Whoa! Did I really write that?” I’ve moved on, started on my second one now — more accurately, I’ve written three different versions of the beginning of the first chapter, so there’s some way to go yet.
The future of the blog? I don’t really know. I now write a column on sex and dating for a newspaper, so there is another forum available for the kind of writing I used to do only on TCC. Also, the anonymity has gone, so I might have to consider taking the blog in a new direction. Or I might even stop blogging altogether if I feel like it doesn’t serve a purpose anymore. I’m not as addicted to it as some people think — there’s a lot more to my life. n
(As told to fellow blogger Jai Arjun Singh)
