Advice, shmadvice - for my younger self, by Harini Nagendra

Here's an interesting prompt - state how long you’ve been writing, and what advice would you give to your younger self before you turned professional?

If you ask most writers, I think they will tell you that they always wrote - or at least, always told stories, as long as they could remember. Even if, sometimes, the story was narrated to an audience of just one - themselves. 

My earliest memory of story-telling is probably a very Indian story, that too of an Indian who grew up in the 1970s, in an era before globalization made everything available to us one mouse-click away. My father traveled on a work trip, and came back with a tin of Royal Dansk butter cookies for us. We loved the cookies, but my mother liked the circular cookie tin even more - it was perfect for her button collection. My mother sewed, an art I do not possess - I still remember a layered chocolate brown lace skirt she made for me, which I was devastated when I outgrew. She had a terrific collection of buttons, large and small, mother-of-pearl and cloth, metal and bone, all colours, shapes and sizes, built with care from years of living in multiple cities, following my father, whose work as a bureaucrat took us from place to place.

On Sundays and summer vacations, I remember sitting on my parents' bed, Dansk butter cookie tin open, buttons spread across the sheet in neat piles, playing my favorite game, 'button button' (not the most imaginative of names). In my mind, I was a button seller in an Alladin-style market, with tents and magicians, fire-breathing artists and fortune tellers, selling buttons that magically transformed themselves into exquisitely embroidered brocade, gold and silver, sweets of bewildering variety, or anything else that took my fancy. I was also the customer, many different kinds of customers, exploring the market, haggling for deals, riding my magic carpet from one location to another.

Eventually of course, I grew out of it. My mother tossed the tin eventually, when it lost its paint and started to rust around the edges. But I kept telling stories, to anyone who would listen. My first 'professional' writing was non-fiction, for popular science magazines - and my first few books were non-fiction books too. 

I published my first non-fiction book, Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future, which is the first ecological history of any South Asian city, in 2016. 

Then came Cities and Canopies: Trees of Indian Cities, in 2019, with my co-conspirator Seema Mundoli

And then the first fiction book, The Bangalore Detectives Club, in 2020 - 

and several others after that - fiction and non-fiction. Here are a couple more

I'm now editing my 8th book, Into the Leopard's Den - and I finally realized I can, after all, call myself a professional writer. Even though I'm not a full-time writer.

So - what advice would I give my younger self? I don't know. I've never been good at seeking, or taking advice - even from myself. I suspect if I gave my younger self advice, she would bristle and proceed to ignore it. So perhaps the wiser route would be to stay quiet.

But if my younger self was inclined to listening, I would say this - forge ahead. Don't listen to the nay-sayers, the Debbie Downers, the people who discourage enthusiasm with gloomy faces and gloomier warnings. Or to those who warn about how terribly hard the business of writing is. Only you know the path you lie on, and the joy that story telling brings you. 

And don't worry too much about marketing, advertising, and the business end of things. Of course they are important. But I remember one piece of advice I did read, which stayed with me - the best way to reach more audiences and to sell more books, is to write more books.

And that's it from me, at least for this time! Over and out.