Subhechcha Ganguly 
Vikram Suryawanshi has authored the book “A Man with a White Shadow”. He also runs a magazine company “Mirror Review ” and is pursuing law (He has also completed Engineering and MA in Literature). We would know more about him in this interview.
Q1) When did you recognize your calling as an author?
There isn’t a single defining moment or an epiphany that pushed me to become an author. I think giving credit to a single experience would be wrong on various levels. Because we feel a lot of things. Sometimes because of our imagination and other times because of the experiences we have. Suppose I am playing football, a general emotion of becoming good at it and daydreaming that I will be a great footballer is natural. Sometimes we see someone sing and instinctively try to imagine ourselves as a singer who’s singing with all those emotions. And if I become a good singer, I cannot credit that imagination as a calling for becoming a singer. And I got an agile imagination, I have been an astronaut a few times. So I won’t credit a single point where I knew I would be an author.
I think I have become a writer because of a series of emotions and experiences that directed me here. And yes I agree that there have been some prominent incidents that pushed me intensely. But explaining those incidents here would be difficult.
But I will tell you why I started writing. Since childhood, I was bad at small talk. But I could talk for hours if someone was ready to sit and have a conversation. Over the time, I started getting some complicated ideas and philosophies, which would be really difficult to explain in general conversations. For that, I needed to create an environment, so writing was a good tool, where I could create some context to tell something that I want to tell. Because just passing the message is never important, telling the gravity of that message is important. Now anyone would say “I love my mother,” but this is just a piece of information, and I am not telling the intensity of it. So what I would do is write a fictional story and create incidences where I can portray how that character feels, so that readers understand the true nature of the emotions I am trying to explain. And I liked this tool, so I sticked with it.
This is the exact reason why I am finding it difficult to answer your question. If I tell you any of the incidences, it would be passing on the information, but who cares about just the information?
Q2) Tell us about your favorite author or poet and your favorite composition.
I was awestruck when I read Shame by Salman Rushdie. While reading it, I realized in all senses the extent of opportunities a writer has. The wonders an author can create. The levels that one can build. Because I understood that there is never one story, there are a lot of layers in a single story, and a good reader is someone who can understand most of those layers. I understood that good works can only be understood by a really small number of readers. I learned that this is what an author does, writing different things for different people, through a single story.
Q3) How did you decide the plot of “A Man with a White Shadow?”
I had a rough idea about the plot before I started writing this novel. This novel is inspired by one of the short stories I had written a long time ago. While writing that short story, I realized the potential of that story. But I just had an idea around which I needed to build a plot. I thought about numerous things, but the aim behind writing this novel was to portray life. So that is how I wanted it to be. As in life, we think that we know where we are going but everything turns out so different. Not just the major milestones, but each of our experiences is so unexpected and fresh. Although emotionally we get overwhelmed with each moment, if we step back a little, we are so surprised to see how distinct the environment around us is all the time, and how uniquely we feel at every instance.
That is how I tried to keep the plot of my novel.
Q4) There is a lot of hard work that goes behind the process of authoring the book. Starting from writing the manuscript, to publishing it, tell us something about the journey. Also, attach the link to the book for readers.
Yes, there is a lot of hard work, in all stages, be it writing the first draft, editing, or publishing. In the beginning stages, I was mostly busy with creating ideas and thinking about how to execute those ideas. I started writing it because of the core ideas and plot, but as I started, I realized that I need to create a whole world there. Creating a world there needed me to observe this world minutely. So because of this journey, I acknowledge a lot of details around me.
And as time passed and as the book started to take shape, the most challenging thing was dealing with the insecurities. Writing a novel was like coming out to the world. It is sharing what you think and how you think. It’s sharing what’s inside you. And as the date of publishing approached I started becoming unsure of whether I wanted to take this bold step.
So in the nutshell, I think writing and publishing a book was a beautiful journey in itself, and it transformed me in various ways and on various levels. I learned a lot of things about myself and I learned a lot about writing books. Not just writing, but also about reading. The way I read and the way I write have evolved significantly because of this novel.
And here’s the link to my book: A Man with A White Shadow
Q5) What is your one piece of advice to authors, who want to take up a career in writing?
Making a career in writing is a vast thing to talk about. The whole marketing industry runs on writing. And now, as a lot of different types of content are being consumed, writers have a lot of opportunities.
But strictly speaking about books, I would say that you really need to be a good salesperson along with being a good writer. I lack in selling because of my nature, but I would tell new authors that books don’t sell themselves. And somehow people care more about the messenger than the message. So first write a good book, that’s one battle. And “selling it” that’s another battle, and to become a successful author, you need to win both battles.
