{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"500 Words by Lee Schneider","title":"Ep 10 - On a Call With Vikram Chandra, Novelist","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1005,"description":"This week's call is with Vikram Chandra, novelist, software developer, and deep thinker about the creative process. I first discovered his work when I read his bestseller Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty, a book about the creative drives and lives shared by writers and coders. One of the book's most mind- blowing sections (I am re-reading it this week) is about the precision of Sanskrit as a language. In 500 BCE, a scholar named Panini wrote a grammar of Sanskrit that fit in just 40 dense pages. His work has influenced Western grammatical theory for centuries, and that theory \"became the seedbed for high-level computer languages,\" as Vikram points out in his book. You can draw a line connecting Sanskrit with how computer programs are conceived and written. That was my point of entry into his work, but I wanted to interview him because he wrote something that terrified me. I learned from reading a blog he wrote that he doesn't outline his long, complex novels. He writes with purposeful ambiguity. As you begin, you know very little about what the book is. But the thoughts and visions persist, which means that this character and her world have some kind of special energy for you, and you want to know more about this character, what her situation is. - Vikram ChandraThis means that he may spend years writing his way into a story, leaving big plot holes, learning about the characters as he goes, until the novel comes into focus. This seems like a scary way to write, but it has successful practitioners. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Sacred Games is a literary novel that is also a crime novel, a detective story, and a thriller. It has a hundred characters. It became the first original television series from India on Netflix. So feeling along in the dark might be a good way to write a book. Novelist E. L. Doctorow described his writing process like this: “You know the...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/X5HUnOtwrsKioPJQYK5pNJTgXwWEAbojlLonLvhQzQ0/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS82NWVh/Mjc4NzJhMmFiYzA0/MzY4NTQzYWIzMmEy/MTFmMC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}