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'I Wish More Writers Would Fight For A Big Advance'

The author, whose sequel to his popular novel has got him a record advance, reportedly around Rs 14 crore, on almost everything under the sun but the actual writing

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'I Wish More Writers Would Fight For A Big Advance'
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Vikram Seth’s announcement last week of a sequel to his popular novel A Suitable Boy, came as a shot in the arm for the publishing industry plunged into its worst-ever crisis. Penguin grabbed the English language rights (except in the US) for a record advance, reportedly around Rs 14 crore. Lying lazily in bed in his heritage country house in UK, the literary superstar talks with Sheela Reddy about almost everything under the sun but the actual writing.

You are the first Indian writer to have got, and continue to get, a big advance, in a way professionalising writing, making it possible to earn a living from it without resorting to a day job?

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I never thought that would happen. If you look at my first two novels—The Golden Gate and A Suitable Boy—no one would have thought they would get a decent advance—and of course, The Golden Gate didn’t. That (money) was never my initial motivation. But I am very grateful that it actually gives me the time to concentrate on writing and other things that interest me, rather than being tied to some other kind of job. Or worse, a job involving words which I think depletes one of a particular kind of energy.

Money is not your initial motivation for writing, but you still fight hard to ensure you get a high advance?

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Absolutely. I wish I had a patron, but I don’t. Anything that I live on is what I’ve earned myself. Those books of mine that are remunerative—I’m not talking about poetry here—take years to write, and I am never sure they’ll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one. Over the short period when you are negotiating, you might as well bring to bear all your economic knowledge and all your close reading of whatever is on offer. I think that’s only right. I wish more writers would do it.

So you think all writers should hire a good agent?

I think a good agent is important but a writer shouldn’t just depend on the agent. He (or she) should also familiarise himself with the rather boring terms of the (publisher’s) contract, and see if he wants to give away certain rights or not.

What’s your advice to a writer on how to fight for a good advance?

I think a lot depends on what your bargaining power is. I don’t know how much bargaining power I would have had at the beginning. But even at the beginning one should read the contract and not be so grateful that you just roll over and accept whatever a publisher demands. Publishers are tough cookies.

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Does taking a big advance place a burden on you?

A little bit, yes. By having taken an advance I am in a kind of debt, so I have to write the book. It’s true that Penguin is a large company and wouldn’t go bust if I didn’t write a book that gave them adequate sales, but since people have put their trust in me, I have to at least try to deliver a manuscript within a reasonable period. Now whether that puts too much pressure on me or not, I’d say on the whole, not. Because I wouldn’t have tendered the book in the first place if I was not already enthused about writing it.

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Could you describe your working methods—a typical writing day?

No, no, it’s too boring for words. I am a very erratic and lazy person. I write in bed. In fact, I am lying in bed during this interview, staring at a pleasant view and thinking: I’d better get up now. The problem with too beautiful a view is that it’s alright for the mulling stage. But for the writing stage, you want to be somewhere without a view, especially if it is very different from what you’re writing.

You are coming to the novel after a long hiatus (An Equal Music came out in 1999). What have you been doing in the interim?

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Well, I wrote Two Lives—that took a lot of time. I’ve also been writing poetry, doing quite a lot of (Chinese) calligraphy and painting in general.

Will you have to put all that aside now?

It’s very difficult for me to predict what I’ll be doing. I will be writing, of course, but I hope I won’t put everything else aside. If I am inspired to do a painting or write a poem, that’s what I’ll do. And that’s only as far as work is concerned.

One thing one notices about you is that you hate to repeat yourself, not just in subject but even form, and are constantly in search of a new genre. Will writing about current times pose the necessary challenge?

In a way the two novels that I wrote other than A Suitable Boy—I mean The Golden Gate and An Equal Music—were set in the present. It is exciting to write about the present once one gets beyond the trivia of the moment. As a time to live in, as a time to think about, the present is intriguing. Anyway, I am not so bothered by the difficulties I will face when I begin to tackle an enterprise or the challenge it poses. What is really important to me is the amount of enthusiasm I feel for it, how inspired I am by it.

So did you take a long time searching for a project that would hold your interest, or was this idea of doing a "jump sequel" a eureka moment?

I suppose you could call it a eureka moment but I would say it was more a eureka period, if you can call it that. I didn’t really look for it. After a few years of publishers and indeed readers asking me to write a sequel, A Suitable Girl, I realised I wasn’t going to do it. And then, many years later, thinking about the characters, I began wondering what Lata would be like, not what she would be like in 1952, where I left her in A Suitable Boy, but now, in 2009. How many children had she had, what was she like as a grandmother, what had her working life been like, how had life changed her? I suddenly realised once again I was becoming intrigued by her. Then I thought, maybe that’s what I should do, instead of taking up the story in the ’50s—which had never really caught my interest.

So you woke up one morning deciding to write a jump sequel?

I know you want something chatpata, but it wasn’t like that. As I said, writing a sequel was the last thing on my mind. But now it began to fascinate me. Everything around Lata had changed as well. Were the concerns that existed in the first general elections the same as those in the 15th? I realised that actually the thing that had eluded me all these years was there all the time. That is, the Lata who would be living today. And, of course, her grandson, for whom a suitable girl would be sought.

Matrimonial searches have widened with Facebooks and shaadi.coms. Will you go into all that?

Why not? My first novel, The Golden Gate, began with a personal ad—Janet, stuck in an unsatisfactory love life with John, decides to advertise for him in a San Francisco paper. But there’s nothing new about all this. Even the village naai is actually a kind of Facebook.

So will you be researching matrimonial sites and Facebook?

I don’t want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of writing. It’s rather like a pressure cooker with a certain amount of pressure in it—the more you let out, the less you cook.

How do you see India changing?

We’ve made a lot of progress but there’s no reason to sit on our laurels and say, "Oh well, most of the work has been done". Far from it. The disparity, the tragedy across the Indian countryside cannot be glossed over. And then, there’s always religious intolerance and bigotry in the background. For example, even on the question of the judgement delivered by the Delhi High Court last week (legalising homosexuality between consenting adults), one has to expect something of a backlash, perhaps an appeal; this is not the end of the road by any means.

With political parties being so cagey on that issue, it would seem that while the legal battle has been won, the moral war still lies ahead?

That’s understandable, because Indian society is very conservative. It’s tolerant, but it’s also conservative. But we have a constitutional structure and we have fundamental rights for everyone, so what’s been done is a great thing. I think the judgement will be very difficult to successfully appeal against in the Supreme Court because it’s so cogent, lucid and well-grounded.

It must be something of a personal triumph for you, considering that you were leading the campaign to challenge Section 377?

I’d hardly say that. I may have helped in a small way regarding the 2006 petition, but the people who deserve the credit are the people who from 2001, and indeed much earlier, fought through law and activism for the logic and humanity of the cause and were not deterred despite the many setbacks. But I do feel elated—I’ve read the judgement and am impressed by it. Not only because it comes down on the side of justice, but because of its style of reasoning, its width of understanding while at the same time remaining grounded in Indian constitutional principles.

Since your sequel is set in India, will you live here while you work on it?

That’s pretty much up in the air. I hope to spend plenty of time in India, and in parts of India other than the setting of A Suitable Boy. Well, let’s see—I’ve only just announced it, I’m still thinking about the subject. But most of it will be set in India, I’m sure, even if a little bit of it may be set abroad.

Will it follow the lives of only the Mehras, or all the four families in A Suitable Boy?

The Mehras will be at the core of it because, in a sense, they were the core of A Suitable Boy, but I think there will be plenty of news of the others as well.

And will it be just as long (1,350 pages)?

Umm, twice as long.

TWICE AS LONG?

No, no, I just wanted your reaction. I don’t know at this stage how long it’s going to be.

In hindsight, do you feel A Suitable Boy was too long?

Not particularly. But in foresight, I never thought it would be so long.

So this could turn out to be longer than A Suitable Boy?

I suppose so but I hope not, because if it turns out to be longer, I don’t think I’ll be able to complete it within the period that I had thought to be realistic. (A Suitable Girl has been announced for 2013).

You are the first writer from India who wrote literary fiction that sold like commercial fiction, blurring the distinction between the two. Do you deliberately aim to be readable?

I certainly aim to be readable because those are the kind (of books) I like to read. I like to make things as clear as possible within the limits of the complexities of human relations and the structure of language. I don’t try to make things simplistic, though. I do hope this distinction between the literary and the commercial is one that will be increasingly blurred. It never used to be like this in the 19th century. Writers like Dickens and Austen were read very widely. I don’t see why in the 20th century writers started writing in such an abstruse manner that unless you have a degree in English Literature—and perhaps not even then—you can’t read or enjoy their books. Critics say that the so-called airport novel is a kind of shlocky, formulary fiction. But for all its shlockiness, at least it is a page-turner, you want to know what’s happening. Basic issues of human interest—honour, ambition, love, enmity, family, money, intrigue, death—really matter, rather than the etiolated idea of writing some over-dense, over-referential literary construct.

The argument that’s usually made for literary writing is that it may be hard reading but it’s rewarding in the end precisely because of its density.

Well, it’s an argument, I suppose. But for me the pleasure of banging my head against a dense brick wall is in the stopping. That’s an exaggeration, of course—certain things can’t be written simply and it’s good they aren’t. But a novel that is deliberately abstruse is not what I enjoy reading. That’s why, for example, I much prefer the Joyce of Dubliners to the Joyce of Finnegan’s Wake. I’d go further and say I prefer Dubliners and Portrait of An Artist even to Ulysses.

Is the nineteenth century novel a model for your writing?

Not really a model, but I admire it for its readability, and for the fact that literary and emotional richness and, if you like, density are not sacrificed at the altar of this readability.

But there were chunks of discursive treatises—essays, if you can call them that—wedged into the novel then, especially Russian novels.

I know what you mean—of history, and this, that and the other. I try to avoid that.

But you had a bit of that in Two Lives?

Yes, you’re right, but Two Lives wasn’t a novel. It was a kind of memoir cum meditation cum essay, a different genre.

But if your novel is going to be about changing India and politics and so on, won’t you need to squeeze those discursive bits into it?

Only if they are involved in the lives of my characters. I’m not writing an essay or a political tract. If, for instance, in A Suitable Boy the minister of revenue had not been carrying out land reform, I’m not sure that land reform would have entered the book. The novel isn’t a vehicle for throwing in the author’s political views. It has to be based on its characters and their obsessions and enthusiasms.

Many novelists today are using the novel as a vehicle for ideas, rather than for telling a story. You don’t believe in that?

I won’t take a stand on that issue. But in my own case, the novel is based on characters rather than the author’s injection of something overtly extraneous. On the other hand, my characters would be boring if they didn’t have views of their own. For instance, the anti-nuclear movement entered The Golden Gate because one of the characters was interested in it. But part of the reason for that might have been that my brother (Shantum) was interested and talked to me a lot about it. Quite apart from the author’s narrative voice—and one can get quite a lot about the author’s general attitudes through that—there may be certain aspects of the author’s specific views that enter the novel, but it’s best done, in my case, through the aegis of the characters.

Your family, especially your mother, has been the muse for much of your writing. Will she continue to be the muse for A Suitable Girl?

God knows. I’ll ask her what she thinks about it.

She doesn’t have a choice, surely?

(Laughs). She might say in response to that, that we are not a muse.

How do you plan to research your book?

I’ll talk to people.

You don’t read newspapers, I recall you telling me once?

I do read newspapers sometimes. I just don’t subscribe to any. But my mother reads enough newspapers for three people. So I can get all that from her.

Will there be sex in your book?

Let me ask you this: is there sex in life?

Absolutely, yes.

Well, all I can say at the moment is this—I’m not quite sure what the book will be like and what it’ll contain, but please allow it to surprise me as well.

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