On Writing Your First Book--With Arvashni Seeripat

This is my LinkedIn newsletter, and I hope you enjoy the story this week. Arvashni Seeripat joined me to discuss self-publishing her first book.

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This article shares a conversation between book coach Deborah Ager and novelist Arvashni Seeripat about the process of collaborating on Arvashni’s first self-published novel.

Arvashni Seeripat is the author of The Story I Told Myself.

Can you tell us about your novel, The Story I Told Myself, and describe the story for us?

I'm part of the Indian diaspora, which consists of people of Indian origin that were taken from India by the British across the world to anywhere there were sugar producing areas...I'm a product of indentured laborers that settled in South Africa around the 1860s. That’s very much a part of who I am culturally, and I've always been fascinated by the story of people that leave their land, go to new lands and have to set up life in this new place that they call home.

I've always wanted to tell the story. And so the book that I wrote, which is called The Story I Told Myself, is a story of triumph of the human spirit, overcoming a whole lot of challenges, overcoming hardships, and demonstrating human spirit through perseverance, determination, and sometimes through the hard things that we have to go through…

This book tells a story about a young woman, Shivali, who has two little children, and they have to leave India. [To do that, they must] cross what is known as the “black waters” or the Kala pani to arrive in South Africa and start working in this land as indentured laborers….The story traces some of the challenges they have faced, but it also tells the story of my people and shares how they built their lives in South Africa.

Can you talk about what you were struggling with before we began to work together on your book?

Where do I start, Deb, about what I was struggling with?

I was introduced to you by a very good friend of mine who said to me, “Arvash, you want to tell a story, but you need help to help you figure out how to tell the story.”

I was not sure how to start putting pen to paper to turn a story in my head into a story that somebody else would want to read. It was very difficult for me. At the time I met you, the biggest challenge I had was translating what was a whole lot of ideas in my head into a story on a piece of paper.?

What I loved about how you and I worked together, Deb, was, first of all, I loved the ease of it, the ease and the conversation of it, the dialogue that was going on between you and me.

You helped me take all of those words that were just words, themes, and ideas, and…through our conversation…you created a word map for us. I recall that I still have that [map] because it was such a cool thing to have…

When [the ideas] moved out of my head and…sat visually on a piece of paper, we could start to see what the story was going to look like….One of the biggest gifts you gave me during this writing process [was]...the framework of how to take ideas and thoughts and start to coalesce them and start to watch how a true theme or the frame of a story starts to emerge.

Read the rest of this self-publishing success story on the blog!