Your book is titled Acts of God. Do you believe in one and why (yes/no)?
The third option – try again later! The book explores a different way in which it is possible to be a god. To that effect, if one stumbled upon the imposition of having to be a god, and was preoccupied with their own desires what would it feel like to be a subject of this divinity? I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit to reach out to find some freedom from suffering, whether or not that is housed in some divinity. I certainly believe in the gods that I have written.
Tell us about your connection with science and the fact that people think you’re a geek.
I don’t think I’m much of a geek. I did write software for some time and still do a little for fun, but that’s closer to this generation’s version of having a woodcarving hobby or making ships in a bottle. It’s odd, I was trained in science and worked in tech, and the entire time pined to be in a creative field and now that I work in this world, I find myself longing for science. I think it’s best to have one foot in every stream that is trying to understand the world and, hopefully, to arrive at some composite knowledge of just what this all is. This probably sounds very geeky.
I’ve looked up everyone’s process that I could. Stephen King’s books, PG Wodehouse and Jack Kerouac’s notebooks, and Ray Bradbury’s advice. There are many places on the internet devoted to almost-fetishising the routines of the greats. I think one aspect of looking all this up is simply doing busy work to avoid writing. The other need this serves is the search for some kinship. Writing a book is such a daunting prospect, you want to know if there was someone who figured this all out; someone with a foolproof method to brave the storm, who wrote it down so you could also use it. Turns out that there is no magic secret. You have to climb your own mountains. My writing heroes have also shifted as I’ve grown older, from people who wrote one book before spontaneously combusting to people who enjoyed longevity in their careers. I’d like to do this for a long time. So the three pieces of advice all my research has yielded are: be excited, be disciplined, and don’t take it so seriously.
Is writing speculative fiction more liberating than writing scripts for standup?
Standup is wonderful but comes with a lot of constraints. It has to be consistently funny, extremely precise, and conversational. While these constraints force you to process ideas in a certain way, often coming up with exciting conclusions and ways of seeing the world, you often end up with a lot of concepts that could never be done on stage. In that way, writing fiction is immensely liberating. I can reach deep into my vocabulary and produce insane sentences, express every emotion that insists on being expressed and explore every notion in the space it demands. The downside is it takes very long to get into a reader’s hands.
A lot of comedy writers camouflage politics with humour to soften the blow. Do you do that in your book?
As a professional softener of blows, I can say that the reader will easily get the answer to this question.
What’s the hardest and easiest thing about writing long-form narratives, such as a book?
I’ve written another book before Acts of God, and I wrote that one the way I write movies. Everything is plotted out, every character’s emotional journey, the beats of the story and where they need to happen, then subdividing those into chapters, having exciting things happen at act breaks and after I had done all this plotting, I found that I knew exactly what was to happen before I even started writing the book. The architect approach didn’t seem to appeal to me for novel writing, while it produces a pacy, precise, planned plot, it didn’t have an element of magic I was looking for. So, for Acts of God, I started with two characters and a premise and resolved to allow the book to unfold. The upside of this is the excitement I felt every day, going to see how I was going to get the characters out of a scrape or more plainly — what would happen next. The challenge is it creates a rather bloated first draft, where the pace is sometimes inconsistent, with some characters who simply atrophy and others who demand to become protagonists. The primary challenge then is to have the will and energy to do several revisions. The published version of Acts of God is the seventh draft. This is as shiny as it could become. I wonder what people will think.
Arunima Mazumdar is an independent writer. She is @sermoninstone on Twitter and @sermonsinstone on Instagram.
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Your book is titled Acts of God. Do you believe in one and why (yes/no)?
The third option – try again later! The book explores a different way in which it is possible to be a god. To that effect, if one stumbled upon the imposition of having to be a god, and was preoccupied with their own desires what would it feel like to be a subject of this divinity? I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit to reach out to find some freedom from suffering, whether or not that is housed in some divinity. I certainly believe in the gods that I have written.
Tell us about your connection with science and the fact that people think you’re a geek.
I don’t think I’m much of a geek. I did write software for some time and still do a little for fun, but that’s closer to this generation’s version of having a woodcarving hobby or making ships in a bottle. It’s odd, I was trained in science and worked in tech, and the entire time pined to be in a creative field and now that I work in this world, I find myself longing for science. I think it’s best to have one foot in every stream that is trying to understand the world and, hopefully, to arrive at some composite knowledge of just what this all is. This probably sounds very geeky.
I’ve looked up everyone’s process that I could. Stephen King’s books, PG Wodehouse and Jack Kerouac’s notebooks, and Ray Bradbury’s advice. There are many places on the internet devoted to almost-fetishising the routines of the greats. I think one aspect of looking all this up is simply doing busy work to avoid writing. The other need this serves is the search for some kinship. Writing a book is such a daunting prospect, you want to know if there was someone who figured this all out; someone with a foolproof method to brave the storm, who wrote it down so you could also use it. Turns out that there is no magic secret. You have to climb your own mountains. My writing heroes have also shifted as I’ve grown older, from people who wrote one book before spontaneously combusting to people who enjoyed longevity in their careers. I’d like to do this for a long time. So the three pieces of advice all my research has yielded are: be excited, be disciplined, and don’t take it so seriously.
Is writing speculative fiction more liberating than writing scripts for standup?
Standup is wonderful but comes with a lot of constraints. It has to be consistently funny, extremely precise, and conversational. While these constraints force you to process ideas in a certain way, often coming up with exciting conclusions and ways of seeing the world, you often end up with a lot of concepts that could never be done on stage. In that way, writing fiction is immensely liberating. I can reach deep into my vocabulary and produce insane sentences, express every emotion that insists on being expressed and explore every notion in the space it demands. The downside is it takes very long to get into a reader’s hands.
A lot of comedy writers camouflage politics with humour to soften the blow. Do you do that in your book?
As a professional softener of blows, I can say that the reader will easily get the answer to this question.
What’s the hardest and easiest thing about writing long-form narratives, such as a book?
I’ve written another book before Acts of God, and I wrote that one the way I write movies. Everything is plotted out, every character’s emotional journey, the beats of the story and where they need to happen, then subdividing those into chapters, having exciting things happen at act breaks and after I had done all this plotting, I found that I knew exactly what was to happen before I even started writing the book. The architect approach didn’t seem to appeal to me for novel writing, while it produces a pacy, precise, planned plot, it didn’t have an element of magic I was looking for. So, for Acts of God, I started with two characters and a premise and resolved to allow the book to unfold. The upside of this is the excitement I felt every day, going to see how I was going to get the characters out of a scrape or more plainly — what would happen next. The challenge is it creates a rather bloated first draft, where the pace is sometimes inconsistent, with some characters who simply atrophy and others who demand to become protagonists. The primary challenge then is to have the will and energy to do several revisions. The published version of Acts of God is the seventh draft. This is as shiny as it could become. I wonder what people will think.
Arunima Mazumdar is an independent writer. She is @sermoninstone on Twitter and @sermonsinstone on Instagram.
Continue reading with HT Premium Subscription
Daily E Paper I Premium Articles I Brunch E Magazine I Daily Infographics