I love to read about how a book that I’m reading came into being. What made the writer write this particular book? What are some of those little stories the reader knows nothing about?
And that’s why I’ve written a post like this for three of my books:
Now, it’s time for Uncontrollable, which has rather unconventional beginnings. Why did I write a fantasy in verse? What was I thinking?
The answer is that it didn’t start off in verse at all. I wrote it in prose, probably sometime in 2018, and I started pitching it in 2019. I’m a rewriter much more than a writer, and here’s how Uncontrollable became what it is.
I first pitched The Machine of Kallua (as it was then called) on 7 May 2019. Yes, I have a spreadsheet to keep track of submissions.
Publisher One held on to for quite a while, enough that I like to think that it was on a maybe pile. Ultimately, though, I received a form rejection, ‘Our lists are full.’ To say that it was a disappointing response would be to put it mildly.
I tweaked the manuscript, then tweaked it again, and then sent it to Publisher Two, who ghosted me.
About the same time, I increasingly heard whispers: ‘Indian fantasy just doesn’t sell.’ Yes, middle-graders read fantasy, but they read Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. The fantasy market is inundated and there just isn’t room for more.
I shelved The Machine of Kallua.
But then I pulled it out again, and worked on it again six months later. I wasn’t quite ready to give up on it. And Publisher Three gave me the best possible feedback.
So I was really looking forward to being transported to a gritty, thorny, divided world, but each time I read this my problem was that it’s not sounding like that. […] there need to big upsets, shocks and surprises – but here I feel that even the ‘secrets’ are a bit predictable. Also it has too much telling – for e.g., something that you could have made descriptive and emotive is just a lot of conversation and too much information at one point, like a brief. […] I regret that it’s not something I can publish because we really have few fiction slots, and this is not sounding edgy enough.
And this was exactly the feedback I needed. Even as I continued to pitch it to agents in the west (I had nothing to lose!), I started thinking: how can I make it edgier? How can I make it thorny and gritty?
The first thing to do was to get rid of something I keep teaching my students to avoid: an info dump. Secondly, I know there’s a reason I write so many short stories. I love brevity. How could I make fantasy fiction, which relies heavily on world-building, brief?
My two collections of short stories
When I hit upon the very ambitious idea of writing the whole book again in verse, I was terrified. Let me be clear–I’m not scared of rewriting. I love it. But in verse?
I had read no fantasy in verse. Would world-building work at all? I wouldn’t know unless I tried. So I did.
And more than ever before, I received full requests from agents. Several held on for very long and finally confessed that they had no idea how to pitch fantasy in verse, so they would not take it on. I was getting somewhere.
Yet, at the back of my mind, I had two niggling thoughts. One was the oft-repeated phrase that fantasy has no market in India. And two, did verse have a market in India at all?
I’m a huge admirer of the ambitious books Duckbill publishes, so the only person I thought of emailing was Sayoni Basu of Duckbill. Her response made my day.
No market for fantasy, they say. No market for verse, they say. Never mind, says Varsha, I will do them together.
She was willing to take a look, and I was more than happy to send my manuscript to her.
Less than four hours later, I had an email from her saying that she loved what she was reading.
Less than a year later, the book was out.
Yes, it’s an ambitious book. Are there other middle-grade fantasy novels in verse? I would love to know, for I have no idea.
I do know, though, that Uncontrollable (with its gorgeous cover by Isha Nagar) is here.
Leave a Reply