“I was ten years old when I decided I wanted to write. At that time, it had just been a pet project. You see, I was bored of goblins and orcs and the regular monsters in the fantasy universe. So, I decided I would create a new monster so, my story started with the monster instead of the hero. At that time, I knew I wasn’t particularly good but I had started to enjoy it so much that it didn’t really matter. It was only four years and ten drafts later that I realized that writing was the most important thing in my life. When I was young, we went to my ancestral village each year during the festive season of Durga Pooja. My grandfather had been a writer, too but I had never known him. All I knew of him was from his stories and from his garden where he used to sit and write. It is a beautiful place with stone benches, rose bushes, fences and a cobbled street overlooking a pond. Sometimes, I feel that the garden is his story. In my life, I want to leave a story like that behind… something that is not about me, and yet, speaks everything about the things I love and the person I am. To me, being a writer has never been about a perfectly structured book or a story that will sell, but about doing something that I love…something I do for myself and those close to me. Sometimes, when I was little, I would think of myself as a music conductor in a grand orchestra, directing all the words into a beautiful symphony. It hasn’t always been easy, everyone knows about the horrible thing that is the ‘author’s block’, but there is one lesson I have learned and that is to never give up—because each story is a life and you absolutely, never ever should lose hope when it comes to life.”
By Bombadil author Tanvi Jha
