Restarting is never easy: Giorgio Montefoschi

The initial trigger for a novel is generally an image — of a place, a woman, a situation. For the one that's about to be published in September, The Body, it happened to be two brothers seated in the drawing room. The elder one (about 60) was a serious man, protective of the younger one (50-53 years), who looked a bit depressed. But for me the idea or what happens in the book is not very important; from the time of Homer's Odyssey, stories have remained the same. The themes are recurrent — about love, hope, desperation and solitude. So what's important is the characters. And the challenge lies not in finding the character, but in language, in the voice and finding the perfect words to express it.

Proceeding further is difficult many a times. But the characters have to develop by themselves, and often they will also change. For instance, one may have started out as silly, but goes on to grow in a very different way. This can result from change in times or even domain of the writer. But any decision of intelligence causes derailment. Every time, I take a decision and don't allow the book to decide for itself, I end up going on a wrong path. I could still go on writing, turn it into a book, but it won't be my book. I know it. It's almost like a physical feeling, like a stomach ache — you stay with it till you can; once you vomit it out, you're free. And what happens? I write for one month, two months, or even longer, following this line of thought. But once I am convinced it's a mistake, I scrap it. Not the entire book, but say the part from where I started veering.

Restarting though, isn't easy. More so, because for a writer like me, I would say 'blind writer' — who sustains the psychological situation of uncertainty, of waking up every morning and not knowing what will happen next — the effort is immense. Also because for me the concept is not so important, the writing is. To give you an example, Italian novelist Alberto Moravia usually writes six to seven versions of his books, and each time, he does it by keeping the previous one away altogether. So, unlike me, he has a very clear idea of what he wants. But I write with a pen — I need that contact with paper — and if I lose my manuscript, or it gets burnt... I can't begin again. Everything is linked with the act of writing.

— As told to Pooja Bhula