Nishant Kaushik is the bestselling author of Watch Out! We are MBA, A Romance with Chaos and Conditions Apply. He keeps a day job with Infosys Limited and currently lives in Australia. You can find him on Twitter @chaosparticle and can also write to him at [email protected].
Interviews
An Interview with Bestselling Author Nishant Kaushik
March 25, 2016 By Hiten Vyas
We recently carried out an exclusive interview with bestselling author Nishant Kaushik. With popular titles such as Good Boy Joe, Chaos Down Under and Conditions Apply, among others, already under his belt, we caught up with Nishant to find out about his most recent work entitled My Father is a Hero. Read on to find out what the man himself had to say.
Welcome to e-Books India Nishant! We’re very happy to have you join us for this interview. Please tell us about you. Where are you from? What is your professional background and how did you become an author?
It’s a pleasure chatting with you! Thanks for having me here.
Born to Haryanvi parents settled in Ahmedabad, I spent a good number of years in Mumbai before moving to Melbourne. You might hence say there is a little bit of all these cities in me. I keep a consulting job with Infosys by day, but I had begun writing way earlier, circa 2000 – when I wrote columns for my college magazine. The big trigger might have been a newspaper publishing one of my poems. I guess sometimes the littlest highs inspire you towards the biggest leaps.
Your most recent book is entitled My Father is a Hero. Can you please tell us a bit about its overall plot and the key characters in it?
Set in Pune, this book is about an ordinary man who emerges an extraordinary hero in the eyes of his eleven-year old daughter. It is largely a happy story about this relationship between man and child. But it also has strains of the anguish of a single father, common middle-class constraints, and the insecurities a child faces in her growing years. How these characters overcome these internal battles and rediscover their own selves and each other, forms the focal element of the story.
Are you working on any other books(s)? If so, can you please tell us what we can expect to see from you in the future?
I have been thinking of writing an ode to my good old days in high school. Then again, I have an interesting love story in mind and romance is a genre I am keen to explore too. Let’s see which one gets to the finish line first.
Can you please tell us about your approach to writing? For example, do you follow structures and writing rules? Or do you write in a free flow way? Do you have any particular time of the day you like to write? Or any specific environment you prefer to sit down and write?
I don’t follow rules to write; in fact I am not quite sure there are well proven rules to being a successful writer. All advice comes from experience, and experience is always personal. I just set out with an idea in mind and then let my story and its characters grow organically. Once that is done, I can always look at fine-tuning for context and layers.
Once you have a child, he dictates what time of the day you may write at. But I make time when I can during the week, when I am sure I get at least an hour or two at a stretch. I usually prefer writing outdoor, in a cafe or such.
What other things do you like to do when you’re not writing?
I spend most of my free time with my family – helping with domestic chores, entertaining my son, or the likes. I also love watching movies and have a huge collection at home that keeps me busy. And then every weekend, I make sure I catch up with at least one friend in the city.
From your experiences, could you please share 2-3 top tips to help beginner authors who want to publish a novel?
My first and foremost tip to beginners would actually be to not seek tips from any author. The journey of writing is personal to every writer, and somewhat sacrosanct in that sense. Superimposing it with someone else’s advice compromises the quality as well as experience of writing.
However, if I may pick some helpful qualities that can aid one during this journey, they would be clarity of concept, patience, and a lot of brazenness to be able to go out there and sell one’s work to the world.
How can people find out more about you?
I am available on Email and Twitter, and I express my opinions, my state of mind, and some possibly interesting experiences very actively on these forums. You can find me on Twitter @nofreecopies, or write to me at [email protected].
