Vikram Chandra’s latest book is Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty. He has also written the novels Sacred Games and Red Earth and Pouring Rain and the short story collection Love and Longing in Bombay. In July 2018, Netflix released a series based on Sacred Games. In 2019, this series was included in The New York Times’ list of The 30 Best International TV Shows of the Decade. His honours include a Guggenheim fellowship, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia), the Crossword Prize, and the Salon Book Award. He teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has been translated into nineteen languages. He is a co-founder of Granthika, a software startup that is building a next-generation tool for fiction writers.
Vikram’s Character Creation: https://blog.granthika.co/on-character/
Granthika: http://granthika.co
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Transcript
Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.
[00:00:15] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #193 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So pleased that you’re here with me today. Today, I am talking to Vikram Chandra about what sounds to be a very, very cool new app/product, that you can use to write in and keep your writing organized, besides that, he is a very esteemed writer and it was just really fun to talk to him. So I know you’re going to enjoy the interview as that’s coming up. What else is going on around here? Well, I am having an incredibly creative week. I am, you know, in between projects right now, I’m balancing some projects that I want to be working on. I’m waiting for my editor to go over my new edits on Hush Little Baby, and, I’ve already figured out a couple of things that I really screwed up or not really screwed up, but I could do better. So I’m hoping that I get another round. That I can make some not big shifts, but you know, not small shifts to the book. So I’ve already been communicating with her about that, and that is fun. [00:01:26] But what that means is in this in between time is kind of this fertile ground for me to be thinking about what I want to do next. And I was talking to my friend, J. Thorn over at the Writer’s Well, which is a podcast we do. And after our podcast chat, we were talking about other things and he recommended this book to me called E-Myth (E dash myth) And I can’t remember who the author is. It came out like literally 30 or 40 years ago. I think, I think I calculated 35 years ago. So there’s a mount data stuff in there. But was so useful to me to think about basically who I want to be as a writer. Who I want my business to be, what I want my business to be, and what I want to provide my customers, because our readers are our customers and they come to us because they are looking for a certain thing. My readers come to me because they are looking for a certain sense of comfort. And I know I’ve said that on the show before, even when I’m writing it. The scariest book I can possibly write readers say, oh, that is so heartwarming, which is not what I’m going for, but I can’t help but doing that, that is, that is my writing voice, that happens to be my personality, too. [00:02:53] Because I do believe in people, I really truly believe in the best in people. And I know how to bring that out. So I’m going to be doing a little bit of playing with this book that I’ve been calling Replenish for a while. It’s a collection of patreon essays that I’ve been shaping into an actual memoir, somewhat about burnout, somewhat about recovery from addiction. But I’m actually, I’m shifting the lens on it a little bit. I’m shifting the lens so that it is focused on the reader, and less on myself, if that makes sense. I teach memoir. I love memoir. I write memoir and I read memoir slash self-help. And when I’m reading memoir slash self-help, I really love the memoir parts of it. So I’m not going to strip those out, but a large part of me and my heart are now drawn more to pushing out to helping lift up, if that makes any sense. I’m pretty excited about it. Like I’m kind of giddy about it. I am, I changed the title to the book, which I’m not going to tell you yet because I’m going to reveal all soon. [00:04:12] But I think I might be starting a new podcast. Yeah, that, I don’t know. I’ll keep you posted on that too, but it feels like a really exciting time right now. Absolutely nothing will change us. I’ll still be teaching and I’ll still be writing the fiction that I love to write, but in terms of my memoir non-fiction, I wanted to be more helpful than it has been in the past. Without being a how-to, I know that I’m not saying very much, by this, but, but rest assured that I am, I’m, I’m overflowing with excitement about this. So yeah, it’s going to be great. That’s what I’m doing right now. What else am I doing? I feel like I wanted to tell you about something and now I can’t remember it, but I will tell you about two new patrons, Lisa Favish, thank you. Thank you so, so much. I got to work with Lisa on her query letter and it is rad. It’s going to be a great book. And, Anita, Anita Ramirez, edited her pledge up so that she’s now at the level where she can use me as a mini coach and I will answer her questions on the air. I do have a collection of some questions. And I will try to put together that mini episode sometime in the next week. So I was going to ask if you would go over to iTunes or whatever platform it is that you listened to the show on and give it a rating. I never asked for that. I never remember to, but it’s kind of important for visibility and I want to share with you a couple of the most recent reviews, and maybe I will continue to do this. So if you leave a review, I might read it out loud. [00:05:52] So this one is from Anthony Seymour and he says, ‘Hi, Rachael, great show. I’m a non-fiction writer. And I really like your take on telling stories and how it applies to actual real world writing. I love knowing that non-fiction writers are also listening to the show because I think we talk a lot about fiction a lot. But non-fiction, is also so, so fun to write and requires just as much thoughts. So thank you for that, Anthony and this one, really? I never look at my reviews ever on pretty much anything. And I just randomly looked at reviews yesterday to see if I should ask people for more of them and I should, but this one really struck my heart. So this one is from Anton H. Gill and he says, I’ve just listened to my very first episode. And I have to say that even though you didn’t have to, even though I wasn’t looking for it, and even though others might say, you have no business doing this on a writing podcast, I thought that it was brave and progressive of you to touch on the current BLM movement. And more importantly, the role that the Caucasian community needs to play in reforming their mindset. You have a voice and you’ve used it in a very small way to gently encourage others to self-reflect and change, bravo. Anton, thank you that really blew my mind and made me feel good. And also made me feel ashamed that we, as a country, are like this and have to be talking about this, but the fact that you left a review like that, I really appreciate it. [00:07:29] So all y’all. Go over to where you listen to podcasts. If you’ve been listening to me for a show or for a while, and if you don’t mind leaving a review, I’ll probably be looking for them on iTunes because I know where to look there, but if you put one somewhere else, go ahead and send it to me and yeah, I really appreciate it. So that’s that I will let you get into the interview now with Vikram. You’re going to enjoy it. He is a charmer and he absolutely knows of what he speaks. So enjoy. And I’ll talk to you soon.[00:08:01] Hey, you’re a writer. Did you know that I send out a free weekly email of writing encouragement? Go sign up for it at www.rachaelherron.com/write and you’ll also get my Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use today to get some of your own writing done. Okay, now onto the interview.
Rachael Herron: [00:08:19] Okay. Well, I could not be more pleased today to be talking to Vikram Chandra. Hello, Vikram.
Vikram Chandra: [00:08:25] Hi, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Rachael Herron: [00:08:27] It’s a pleasure to have you. I’ve had your beautiful wife, Melanie Abrams on the show, and that was such a treat. And I’m so happy that you reached out and we’re going to do this today. Let me give a little intro to you, because you are an impressive, impressive writer and this, this is great. Vikram Chandra’s latest book is Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty. He has also written the novel Sacred Games and Red Earth and Pouring Rain and the short story collection Love and Longing in Bombay. In July, 2018, Netflix released a series based on Sacred Games. In 2019, this series was included in the New York times list of the 30 Best International TV Shows of the Decade. His honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Crossword Prize and the Salon Book Award. He teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley and his work has been translated into 19 languages. He’s a co-founder of Granthika, a software startup that is building a next-generation tool for fiction writers. Did I say Granthika right?
Vikram Chandra: [00:09:33] Granthika, yeah.
Rachael Herron: [00:09:34] Granthika. Okay. So you do have the T H in there, I was wondering about that. Okay, so we’re going to talk about that because I’m excited about that, but also I, if anybody’s watching on the video, you are surrounded by books. I’m assuming this is your, your home office.
Vikram Chandra: [00:09:47] Indeed.
Rachael Herron: [00:09:48] You get so much done and this show is primarily about writing process of working writers. And I would love to talk to you about how you do this, how you get this done with the family and perhaps how that might’ve changed a little bit during these unprecedented times.
Vikram Chandra: [00:10:06] Yeah. So, you know, I follow this discipline that I think is common among writers. I try and write at regular hours of the day, as much as I can. So you have to treat it like going to an office, right.
Rachael Herron: [00:10:20] Yeah.
Vikram Chandra: [00:10:21] I think it was Picasso who said inspiration exists, but she has to find you working.
Rachael Herron: [00:10:25] Yes, I love that one. And she gets used to finding you in your chair at a certain hour. Yeah.
Vikram Chandra: [00:10:32] Exactly. I should say though, that, you know, since we’ve had kids and then especially since the pandemic, when they’re home all day,
Rachael Herron: [00:10:38] Yeah.
Vikram Chandra: [00:10:39] You have to find these fragments of time at least that’s what I’ve been doing. And I’ve surprised myself by actually being able to do it that way. It’s so not me and then the other thing is that I do that thing where I set myself a daily word target. So I do 400 words and if I reach that, even if it’s like within half an hour, I just knock off and the rest of the day feels like a holiday.
Rachael Herron: [00:11:00] Because you won, you got it done.
Vikram Chandra: [00:11:02] Yes, I got it done. Yeah, and so, so I mean, incredibly enough, you know, after years and years, you, you finally finish, end up with the finished manuscript, right? So yeah, so that’s basically it and yeah, and as you see, I do lots and lots of research, and a pile of books behind me and papers and scan things in my laptop. And that’s, I mean, incredible. Oops, sorry.
Rachael Herron: [00:11:30] No worries. Life happens.
Vikram Chandra: [00:11:32] Yeah. And that’s incredibly valuable. Although I do end up going down these rabbit holes all the time, which might not end up in the books, but they, I want to believe. And I think, really think they do. They form this under a structure that’s very rich and out of which I get unexpected surprises. Right. I mean, just this morning, I was doing some research about- I have a character who’s supposed to be born in a tiny village of India and I was trying to figure out where he’s going to be. And I was looking at a map of that area and I found a forest and like the whole morning is spent on researching this forest, but it’s going to be so cool because it’s, it’s a, yeah. I can put lots of things that are relevant to what I’m writing emerging from that forest.
Rachael Herron: [00:12:18] Isn’t that interesting too, to think about research as that iceberg where, you know, the tip of it is what turns into the book, but the knowledge base that supports it is so huge.
Vikram Chandra: [00:12:29] Yeah. Yeah
Rachael Herron: [00:12:30] How do you manage the writing with Melanie? Like, like how do you, especially with the kids at home in this time. I’m just curious as how two writers living together work.
Vikram Chandra: [00:12:41] Well, before all this happened, we had pretty regular hours because both of us teach at Berkeley fiction. And so we make sure that we’re teaching on alternate days. Right? And, and so we have a common office at the, in the department as well. So we don’t want to get on each other’s nerves there
Rachael Herron: [00:13:00] Perfect.
Vikram Chandra: [00:13:01] So we could alternate it. And, and then for the weekends we could coordinate it. But. Really now, this situation has driven us both into a complete mess and the kids it’s really hard on the kids. Right?
Rachael Herron: [00:13:09] Yeah
Vikram Chandra: [00:13:10] So again, we try as best we can, is to stagger it, right? It’s like, you’re going to take care of them from time actually. But I have to say as always, so much more of the burden falls on the women, right? The mothers always like get it because the girls want, they need her. I don’t know if they need her, but they want to express a different way than they can to me.
Rachael Herron: [00:13:33] And they’re little right?
Vikram Chandra: [00:13:34] They’re 10 and 12. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, those are essential years where you really need that, yeah, right?
Rachael Herron: [00:13:44] Yeah. Exactly. That’s so interesting, but I do love how you say that you’re surprising yourself by getting the work done and the surprising thing for me, is that in this podcast, I keep talking to writers who are saying the same thing. Like I thought this would derail me and it didn’t. I just, I just wrote, I just turned in a book on Monday to my editor and, and it was almost this blessing that I was working on it during the pandemic, because we can go into it and kind of disappear for a while.
Vikram Chandra: [00:14:10] Yeah, I mean.
Rachael Herron: [00:14:12] You find that?
Vikram Chandra: [00:14:13] I do, but I don’t know. I concentrate really hard. So, so I do get annoyed with our, either of the kids when they come in here and they need something during the day. Because then they’re like impatient. They want me to give them something immediately. No drives, go away.
Rachael Herron: [00:14:31] That’s funny, yeah. I don’t have kids. So that at least, you know, I’ve got the dogs and the cats and they’re very easy to tell to go away. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing?
Vikram Chandra: [00:14:43] I think right now, it’s a new area for me. So the last book was non-fiction, right, which I’ve never done. And, and, so that was completely new territory and that was really scary. I mean, especially in terms of finding a structure, right. Because in fiction, I’m very driven by plot. Right. I can figure out what the protagonist and the rest of them want. And then I can put that in action that I’d discover the book through that. And this time I had that, but I’m finding that I don’t want to do a plot in that conventional sense. Right. And so again, it’s like strange new territory for me, and I’m really anxious and I have to say terrified of this, because then I have to give the reader something else. Right. That’s going to drive them forward.
Rachael Herron: [00:15:29] And how do you, how do you balance that? How do you, how do you figure out how to do it?
Vikram Chandra: [00:15:33] Well, I’m on, I’m on first draft right now. So I’m trying not to think about that too much.
Rachael Herron: [00:15:38] Just a mess right now. Yeah.
Vikram Chandra: [00:15:39] Just a mess right now. But I think, I mean, and the non-fiction book actually taught me something about this because it’s got, again, it doesn’t have a straight chronological structure although it’s describing history a lot, of various sorts. But it leaps from across centuries and from place to place. And, you know, you can gain energy in the writing just by making one of those surprise leaps, right. And that’s. No, I’m not doing quite that thing, but I’m managing to do something like it.
Rachael Herron: [00:16:07] Yeah. I like that. That phrase, the surprise leaps, those are the best parts of writing. What is your biggest joy when it comes to writing?
Vikram Chandra: [00:16:16] You know I don’t know Melanie might have said this already when she talked to you, but our friend, Bob Haas, Robert Haas, this amazing poet. And he said that that, writing is hell and not writing is hell, the only tolerable state is just having written.
Rachael Herron: [00:16:37] It is the truest thing that has ever been said about writing.
Vikram Chandra: [00:16:40] Yeah. So, so like I was saying like 400 words, I go do those and then it’s like, so restful. And then the other part is that period, when you’ve turned in a book and the publishers have located, it’s gone off to print. And then before it comes out, you’ve done all the work and there’s nothing else to do. And you’re just off. It’s such a perfect holiday.
Rachael Herron: [00:17:03] That is literally the best part. The best. Oh, what was I going to say about, I just had a tangent in my brain as I was following you. Can you share a craft tip of any sort for us?
Vikram Chandra: [00:17:16] Well, I mean, there’s this, exercise, I guess you’d call it that I do every semester, whether I’m teaching freshmen or grad students. And it’s, I call it 12 questions in search of a character. Okay. So you start with, you know, give your character a name and then, you know, things like, tell us something odd or specific about their body, who, who broke their heart when they were young? Who was the famous person they hate and why? And then finally the, at the end,
Rachael Herron: [00:17:53] I like that one.
Vikram Chandra: [00:17:54] Yeah. And then two crucial questions. You know, what do they want, really desire at this point in their life? And then what’s preventing them from getting it, right. And again, then you’ve got, you know, you’ve got desire, obstacle, right. And then you can figure out like what, what will grow from that, right. And there’s that formula desire plus danger equals drama. Right?
Rachael Herron: [00:18:20] I have actually never heard that. I don’t think, that’s wonderful.
Vikram Chandra: [00:18:23] Yeah, it’s great. So, so that’s usually where it starts for me. Right? So my last fiction book is this enormous 900-page monster about policing and organized crime and international sort of spy intrigue in India. And when I started that, I knew nothing, right. I had this policeman I’d written in that book of short stories that I had won my take on the police procedural, right? Your, your basic story with a dead body at the beginning. And by the end you’ll know why it was why the murder was committed, but this time, the same cop is outside a strange bunker-like building in Bombay. And he’s talking to a gangster, who’s barricaded himself inside a very famous gangster. And the guy’s talking to him over a speaker and I have no idea what the guy was going to say to them. I had no idea who this gangster was, like what he wanted, where he came from. And then by asking questions like this, it, it, I start to discover the history, the backstory, the texture of this, all the people, right.
Rachael Herron: [00:19:33] Yeah
Vikram Chandra: [00:19:34] And then it kind of grows from that. So for me, at least the story never comes externally, right? The architecture of the story is not something I think of first, although sometimes I think people work like that must be blessed, right. Because they can plan, but I’ve never been able to do that. And so then I explore the character and then I figure out things and then I, I can only discover through writing, right. Figure out what the story is. And then what also that means, that also means is that the first and the 19th draft are complete, completely messy and then it makes no sense. So Melanie and I, when we met, I was like halfway through Sacred Games, the big cop, the big crime book. And, you know, my friends used to ask, like, how’s the book going? Where are you? And I would always say in the middle. Yeah. That’s what, for years and years. And then one day, I, I typed the last sentence and I knew that was the last sentence. And Melanie was sleeping in the bedroom and I went and like tugged her toe and she opened her eyes and said, what? And I said, well, I finished. And she said, finished what?
Rachael Herron: [00:20:44] You’re like only the most important thing.
Vikram Chandra: [00:20:46] Right. And then. And then she said, can I read it? And I said, no, sorry, you can’t like, because it’s full of holes and like backtrack and little notes to myself, fix this. It won’t make sense. And I think she wanted to throw something at me. And so then I spent the next four months, like doing the second draft, right. And in which I filled in all that stuff, cut out huge chunks. And it’s, it’s a grind, you know, it’s, it’s debilitating and, and you lose faith in the middle and then you have to work yourself back up and finally gets done. So, yeah, sorry. That was a big, long tangent from craft question. I should say though, that this is going to sound like self-promotion, but, so the software that I’ve been working on is called Granthika. So if you go to blog.granthika.co, I’ve written a bunch of, I guess you’d call them essays, a few essays about writing, right. And one of them is called Finding a Character. Well, you know, on how you figure out characters and how things are, and I’ve outlined it. I’ve given the entire exercise in that
Rachael Herron: [00:21:50] Oh great. Then I will link to that in the show notes for this. So people can go to, HowDoYouWrite.net and I will send you over to the site. And I definitely want to talk about that program, but I, I do want to ask really quickly, just as kind of a curiosity thing. You are so, you do so much research for all of your books. Do you research more for fiction or non-fiction? I’m curious. I mean, it must be non-fiction, right?
Vikram Chandra: [00:22:18] No, both, both, actually the same.
Rachael Herron: [00:22:20] Equally?
Vikram Chandra: [00:22:21] Yeah. Yeah. Because, so for instance, to use the crime book again, as an example, right? Like when I started, the reason I started it was because crime in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s in India in Bombay was, was astonishingly like violent. Right. Sort of what I guess occurred here in the 20s. Right? So there were my father and I were driving back home one afternoon and suddenly we hear automatic weapons, gunfire echoing off the buildings. And so my question was, why is this happening? Right? What is going on? And all I knew about organized crime at that point was what I’d seen in the movies. So because of that cop story that I was talking about, the short story at that time, I’d met a couple of policemen, a crime reporter who’s become over the years one of my best friends, it’s, he’s one of the people that Sacred Games is dedicated to. So I asked these people like, can you introduce me to other people who will talk to me? And then I just like, it spreads like a net, right? Like every person I would meet, I would say the same thing to them. And I find that really valuable because it’s like a kind of anthropological field research. Right? You learn so many things by sitting in people’s offices and there’s some stuff that you absorb unknowingly. This office tells you something about me, right? And you go to their homes and you know, you learn about gangster aesthetics, right? What an intensely, immensely rich guy, like a gangster puts in his living room.
Rachael Herron: [00:23:57] Oh, I’m fascinated. Yeah.
Vikram Chandra: [00:24:00] And then at some point you can use that all in your book. And then I did a lot of reading, right? Like, and, and apart from, like, news reports I mean, some of my friends in the field gave me like police reports, there’s police journals that you can read. Right. So it’s, it’s incredibly enriching and in some sense for non-fiction book, you can’t do the same if you’re writing about events way back in the day. I mean, except when you’re writing about contemporary events. Right. Because you’re going to go and talk to people who are doing tech right, now right?
Rachael Herron: [00:24:36] Right. Right.
Vikram Chandra: [00:24:37] But, but since I was writing about stuff that is happening now, I love doing that. Right. And it’s, like I said, it’s very, it shows up in my writing so it’s a reward. Right. And the most exciting thing is like, after the book was done, I got emails from people I’d never met. Who said, you know, well done. Right?
Rachael Herron: [00:24:57] Oh, yes.
Vikram Chandra: [00:24:59] Right. I mean the best one was like, I’d met this incredible guy, David Sullivan, and we called him Sully. He was a one of North America’s most famous private detectives in the, in the true sense. He was a PI, right. And so when I met him, like every other writer who’d ever met in the life, I was like, Sully, tell me your stories, man. And he was very wary of this. Right.
Rachael Herron: [00:25:23] Of course, yeah.
Vikram Chandra: [00:25:24] And so, you know, the book came out, I went to India for a long summer. And then I get this text message which said, okay, now I know that you’re not just joking. Right. And that was the best compliment would get ever a guy like Sully, who spent a lifetime doing this stuff. Right. You’ve got, you’ve got most of the ground right, right.
Rachael Herron: [00:25:49] Oh, that’s amazing. How do you, how do you organize your research? How do you keep it?
Vikram Chandra: [00:25:54] Oh, you can see the mess, right?
Rachael Herron: [00:25:58] In piles is the answer.
Vikram Chandra: [00:25:59] In piles. Yeah. But see, this is one of the frustrations that, that drove me to, to think about making software for writers. Right? So, so what used to happen and, and Sacred Games was my third book. Right? And so by that time I knew how awful and exhausting it was to manage information, right? So, so you gather all these books, you take notes, you make timelines on the wall or using software, but the problem is that it’s all scattered about, and there’s no connection to your, to your texts right. To your manager. So when you reach page 300 and you know, you suddenly remember, okay, so, and so told me such thing and, you know, 2015, and you want to look that up, you go to your note-taking program and then finding that stuff among 3000 other notes becomes a problem in itself. Right?
Rachael Herron: [00:26:54] Yeah. So tell us how Granthika addresses that.
Vikram Chandra: [00:26:57] Sure. So, so, so what it is, it’s like a- it’s like the child of a weird marriage between a text editor, a database and a timeline, right?
Rachael Herron: [00:27:08] Oh, interesting.
Vikram Chandra: [00:27:10] So what that means is that as you write, you create, I guess, what you could think of as pages or cards for characters, for locations, for objects and for events, right? And then those are very tightly integrated into the manuscript, right? So it’s like sort of doing, writing on Facebook. You do those mentions, right? You do the ad site. And so the text has connections built in, right? So I was writing this morning and I did it. So if I reach, you know, I’m referring to a character named Abba, somebody’s father. And I want to know something about him with one click, I can jump to his cart and then with one click I jumped right back.
Rachael Herron: [00:27:49] That’s cool.
Vikram Chandra: [00:27:50] Right. And so then, you know, the other thing is the timelines, for me at least are one of the most difficult things to keep track of. Right. Especially because I write stuff narratives that are set against actual history. Right. So I’m, if you mess up, right. You know, there were these bomb blasts in Bombay and my character was 32 at the time. And then you imply some, in some other way that he became a cop when he was nine years old. Right. That’s a problem. You know people, readers write emails to you about that kind of thing.
Rachael Herron: [00:28:23] They keep track of that stuff in their head. Yeah.
Vikram Chandra: [00:28:25] Yeah. And it’s, it’s difficult because also you have to keep so much in your head. Right. And you spend, like, it feels to me like manual in a, in a ledger with a Quill pen, you’re doing double entry bookkeeping, right?
Rachael Herron: [00:28:40] Yes. That’s exactly what it is.
Vikram Chandra: [00:28:42] Right. So, so what the, what the, what we’ve done is, so we’ve built this kind of technology, in a sense from the ground up to be able to do this. And it provides lots of other useful things, right? So you can ask the program, give me all the chapters in which Holmes and Watson appear together,
Rachael Herron: [00:29:58] Wow
Vikram Chandra: [00:29:59] And it’ll show you that it’ll, because the dimensions are done, when you look at our character, you can see every place in the entire manuscript where the character has been mentioned. Right. And again, John, with one click to whatever place in the manuscript you want to look at
Rachael Herron: [00:29:19] it’s a lot better than the whole find the, find the word bill, you know?
Vikram Chandra: [00:29:23] Yeah. Right. Especially when bill will show up as a bird’s beak too.
Rachael Herron: [00:29:27] Yes, exactly.
Vikram Chandra: [00:29:28] As an invoice, right. Right. So there’s that the event, the timeline and events are one of the things that are intelligent, right, in that if you say the inquest must come after the murder, right. It’ll figure out that the inquest must also come after the inciting event for the murder.
Rachael Herron: [00:29:51] Wow. That’s smart.
Vikram Chandra: [00:29:53] Yeah. And then, like I was saying, it’s, it’s flexible technology underneath. So in the near future, we can then, we hope to add things like, you know, it can reason over all of this, right? So if you say John marries Kamna, it’ll know that Ajit has now become Kamna’s, John’s brother-in-law right. Stuff like that. So, so. There’s that.
Rachael Herron: [00:30:18] Wow.
Vikram Chandra: [00:30:19] What else? There’s, so, also to get a little tech nerdy, the reason we’re able to do this is because underneath there is a knowledge graph and the text is part of a knowledge graph, and what a knowledge graph means is like, if you imagine a whole network of facts, essentially, that are connected to each other, right. So knowledge operates like that in the real world. Right. You know, I’m so-and-so’s child and my child is their granddaughter. Right. So what this means is that we can, integrate outside knowledge into this knowledge graph. Right? So if there’s something in Wikipedia which refers to your, which is useful to you, we can reach out and get it right. And, and, and sort of show you,
Rachael Herron: [00:31:03] Oh my goodness.
Vikram Chandra: [00:31:04] This might be connected, metrics. Right? So what I mean by that is this, you know, sentence length and, you know, that kind of thing is usually what is given to you. But we are working with one of the world’s leading experts on text analysis. He’s called Andrew Piper at McGill University up in Canada. And he’s helping us put in things like, you know, how many women versus men are there in your manuscript. Right. So if you analyze, pound of basket meals, you know, you see that the homesian universe is very male.
Rachael Herron: [00:31:36] Yeah. Yeah.
Vikram Chandra: [00:31:37] And then for gender conform, conformally, right? Like for are words like beautiful attached to women, much more than which is so annoying. Right? Like, you know, and I realize, as I’m saying all this, I’m making it sound like you need to have a degree in rocket science.
Rachael Herron: [00:31:57] Well, and that’s, that was my next question. How difficult is this? Because this does sound hard. I could barely work
Vikram Chandra: [00:32:02] No, no, no because we work really, really hard right from the beginning to make it not difficult to use. Right. So we had a bunch of writers come on board early and we call them our advisors and we ask them questions. Right. Like what you think will be useful. So there’s a big effort to make the UI, the user-facing interface. Really. Sort of, I wouldn’t call it simple, but like simple to parse. Right. You know what’s going on. And as far as we know, our youngest user now is seven years old and she’s happily making her stories in it. Oh. Which reminds me mentioning it reminded me one of the things she wants to do is to share her stories. Right. And, and so what we’ve got, which I don’t think anybody else has at least at the current time. So you, when you’re, you’re writing your story, you’re building a world, right. You’re creating an entire universe. So what we can do right now is you export that universe, right? Meaning all your characters and events and so forth, and you give it to somebody else and they can import that universe and start working in the same space,
Rachael Herron: [00:33:11] Wow. Yeah.
Vikram Chandra: [00:33:12] Using your character’s, right? And then in the near future, again, we’re going to build a web version, which means everything will be connected. So then you’ll be able to collaborate on your universe with other people across the world. Right.
Rachael Herron: [00:33:26] People will love that.
Vikram Chandra: [00:33:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rachael Herron: [00:33:28] Writers will really love that.
Vikram Chandra: [00:33:30] Yeah. So, so it’s a very ambitious project.
Rachael Herron: [00:33:33] It sounds huge. Yeah.
Vikram Chandra: [00:33:35] Yeah. It’s very exciting. I mean, I’ve been obsessing about this for 25 years since I’ve started Sacred Games and to see it actually come into being, right, because like I’m a programmer, but I’m like, my level of programming is very mid-range. And my, my cofounder, Boris Yordanov, is like mad tech genius. So, so, I think because of him, we’ve been able to make this thing. Right. And so it’s, it’s early days, but it’s great, fun and exciting.
Rachael Herron: [00:34:06] And just to clarify, so is it on the market now?
Vikram Chandra: [00:34:09] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Rachael Herron: [00:34:10] Okay. And it is, it is also a place where you can, you’re writing in it?
Vikram Chandra: [00:34:16] Yes. Yes.
Rachael Herron: [00:34:17] This is where you, and then is it, is there just like a functionality to export it to words so you can set it to your editor?
Vikram Chandra: [00:34:20] Yeah. Yeah.
Rachael Herron: [00:34:21] Okay.
Vikram Chandra: [00:34:22] You can export to Word, Scrivener, PDF, and you can import in the opposite direction, right. From board and scrivener.
Rachael Herron: [00:34:28] Wow, wow.
Vikram Chandra: [00:34:31] Yeah. So, yeah. So it’s early days, I should say also, I don’t know, this is going to sound like a pathetic product plug, but, but one thing we do need help with, two things. One is that we need writers to give us feedback. Right. So we don’t end up sticking in things that aren’t useful to working writers. Right. So we’d love for people to try it out. Right. And there’s a free trial of course.
Rachael Herron: [00:34:56] Perfect.
Vikram Chandra: [00:34:57] A website and then anybody who’s a student or an educator, you can, you get a free subscription, right?
Rachael Herron: [00:35:02] Wow. That’s great.
Vikram Chandra: [00:35:04] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the other thing is that. Okay. So Boris, we have a team of very talented programmers working with Boris, and we have one other person who has a PhD in software requirements engineering. And then there’s me a writer, and we don’t have the resources to hire a growth hacking expert, or a marketing person. So essentially, our marketing is crap. So,
Rachael Herron: [00:35:34] So it really has to be word of mouth at this point.
Vikram Chandra: [00:35:37] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And we really need help in doing that. So, you know, if you guys only have viewers and listeners, you know, like I was saying, try it out. And if you think it’s useful to you, you know, tell other people.
Rachael Herron: [00:35:52] And if you think it’s, if you think it’s not useful in any way, like what, the parts that don’t work.
Vikram Chandra: [00:35:56] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rachael Herron: [00:35:57] Tell you
Vikram Chandra: [00:35:57] Yeah. I mean, critiques of that sort, just like they’re in writing are really, really useful.
Rachael Herron: [00:36:02] Okay. And it’s, and it’s Granthika with the T H in the middle and a K. Okay. So G R A N T H I K A
Vikram Chandra: [00:36:07] T H I K A .co
Rachael Herron: [00:36:11] Perfect. Okay. Yeah. I would really encourage all the listeners to go try that. I know I am going to try it, because I am starting a new book soon. I’m going to need a new place to hold it and to, and to work in it and I would love to try this kind of- I, I see it almost like this, this cobweb underneath it, holding everything up. That’s really beautiful. Thank you. So what are you, what are you working on now?
Vikram Chandra: [00:36:38] Oh, it’s, it’s new or actually, I should say it’s not new fiction. It was fiction I was working on before we started this whole startup thing in 2016. And then I have to tell you, I mean, this is a tangent again, but everything you ever hear about how hard startups are, is true 10 times over, right. The usual startup terrors of like, not enough money, you know, how do you hire people? It’s exhausting.
Rachael Herron: [00:37:06] Yeah
Vikram Chandra: [00:37:07] Like I was saying very pleasing in some, in other ways, right? Like it’s really, it’s creative too. So it’s exciting in that way. So I, I stopped being able to write back then. Right and then just recently, since we released a version one in November, I’m, I’m writing, using Granthika and what I’m working on is, again, an ambitious book, it’s three, three novellas that are set in three different cities in three different centuries. Right. So again, therefore the pile of books, right?
Rachael Herron: [00:37:40] Wow. But they are linked in some way.
Vikram Chandra: [00:37:44] Yeah. Although I’m not quite sure how yet. Right. This is part of my problem as a writer, I have these glimpses of these other cities, but I don’t know how I’m going to get there, what roads I’m going to travel. But, but yeah, so I’m working on that and it’s the usual process, right? Like some mornings I wake up and I have the solution, right, and I write happily and then other times this, I sit on this chair, like staring at the screen, what am I doing? Why did I ever want to do this?
Rachael Herron: [00:38:18] Why am I putting myself through this? I don’t know if you find this, but I always have the solution. The solution comes to me and I think it solved all my problems. And then I get to write and I think, Oh, no solve this tiny problem and I still don’t know what I’m doing with this book. Yeah. Oh, that’s fantastic.
Vikram Chandra: [00:38:32] Yeah. That’s my other craft tip. Now that I think about it is don’t be afraid of revision and revision is so, I mean, I, in some ways, like you were saying, what is the good time in writing? To me, revision is the best time because I’ve done the hard work of laying the foundations. Now I’m making everything fit together and making it pretty right.
Rachael Herron: [00:38:56] My favorite part.
Vikram Chandra: [00:38:59] And I have, I have filmmaker friends who say the exact same in fact, one of them, on Sunday, we had a meeting about another project that we’re trying to put together. And he said that for him editing on the table or nowadays on the computer is the best part for him. Right. Because then you
Rachael Herron: [00:39:16] That must be like what people think of us as writers when they think, how can you revise a book? How do you even hold that in your head? I think of that with a filmmaker. How can they like that just boggles my mind that they are creating something out of all of these pieces and it is basically revision. I’ve never thought of it that way.
Vikram Chandra: [00:39:32] Yeah, yeah, no, it is. And I mean, back in the day I went to film school and I worked on film since then, but you know, you have to work with film strips. Right. And so keeping track of those was insane because you cut out like three frames, right. And then you, you stuck that up on the wall with a piece of tape and if you were very careful, you label that, right. But then four days later you say, oh no, that cuts too soon. And you try and find those three frames and it’s among a thousand other frames. So I, I mean, I’ve always thought that that, that kind of detail obsessiveness is another thing that is valuable and talented editors have that. Right. They can think in this split seconds of time, and then they know where to find the split seconds of time.
Rachael Herron: [00:40:19] Yeah.
Vikram Chandra: [00:40:20] And I mean, I’ve worked with, on one of the movies with one of the most talented editors, Renu Saluja, who, who India has ever produced. And she said, as soon as she got to electronic editing, it made her life so much easier.
Rachael Herron: [00:40:34] I can’t even imagine the difference. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s even bigger than moving from typewriter and paper to a word processor. That’s just cause the cutting room floor is a phrase because it was covered with, with, with frames that didn’t make it.
Vikram Chandra: [00:40:49] Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Rachael Herron: [00:40:50] Oh, that’s fantastic. So, well, thank you for telling us about Granthika. And where can listeners find you online?
Vikram Chandra: [00:40:57] Oh, well it’s just my name, vikramchandra.com, that’s where I live.
Rachael Herron: [00:41:01] Okay. Perfect. Thank you so much for this chat. It has been such a pleasure to talk to you
Vikram Chandra: [00:41:09] Yeah, my pleasure.
Rachael Herron: [00:41:10] And I find you very inspiring and I am not a big researcher. I’m one of those people I research after I’ve written the book and I, and then I correct everything I got wrong in the, in the draft but for some reason, just looking at your office with all the books behind you makes me want to research. So good job on that.
Vikram Chandra: [00:41:25] Well, don’t let me corrupt you in that way. If you’re happy, right? Doing it in your way, I mean, that’s, my students ask me all the time. Right. And when you go out on book tour, people say, you know, how do you do it? And I always try and get, I mean, your, your method is your method. It comes out of your chemistry. Right.
Rachael Herron: [00:41:43] Yes.
Vikram Chandra: [00:41:43] So read all those, you know, how to write books. But don’t listen to all of them.
Rachael Herron: [00:41:48] Yes. And that’s why I do this show because I’m always looking for the best process to write something that’ll make writing easy. And I also know that I’m never going to find it, but what people tell me and what listeners hear, we’re hearing so many different things that we’ll only, you’ll either accept it as part of your process or rejected and then know that about yourself. So, yeah. Brilliant. Well, thank you Vikram, so much. I wish you happy writing and we’ll talk soon. Bye.
Vikram Chandra: [00:42:12] Yeah, you too. Okay. Smooth words to future books.
Rachael Herron: [00:42:15] Thank you, you too. Bye.
Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/
Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.
