‘If one wants to write a book on mythology, there’s no better country than India and no better area than dharma’ | Books and Literature News,The Indian Express
Amish Tripathi on his upcoming volume of the Ram Chandra series, why history is best left to scholars to examine and the elitism in drawing distinctions between literary and popular fiction
The Ram Chandra series is a prequel to the Shiva Trilogy. How did you decide this would be your next project?
The Ram Chandra series had clues of the story placed in the original Shiva Trilogy, which takes place 1,500 years later. After that series was over, I couldn’t decide what to write for several months. Then I went to a lit fest in Mumbai in 2013 and someone spoke quite rudely about Lord Ram. Maybe that incident was meant to happen to me, because I began writing the series the next day.
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This is the fourth book in a five-book series. How far ahead do you plot a series? Do you plot a single book or do you write without a plan?
In some ways, I don’t plan it at all, in others, I do. My first book, The Immortals of Meluha (2010), took four-five years to write and was published in 2010. War of Lanka is releasing 12 years later. Nobody will believe that I planned this entire thing. I go by instinct, but the ending of the book, down to its last paragraph, is very clear in my mind. I’m an instinctive writer, I use no excel sheets or flowcharts to plan the story.
Rating: 5