Archit Taneja was born in Bangalore, every different from the Bengaluru that we know of now. After living in different places throughout his childhood, he finally ended up again in Bengaluru for work. “One thing that hadn’t changed about the city, until very recently, was the big store for children’s clothes and toys. Men dressed in bizarre mascot costumes at the store traumatized me as a kid, and then as an adult. I think it finally shut down a few years ago. The memories still remain, but the closure helped,” says Archit, adding he is soon going to pen down his next – a young adult horror book based on this traumatic memory.
That’s Archit Taneja for you – building on experiences around him, bringing on humour by the tonnes, a scientific approach to case-solving and speaking in a tongue that has everyone from middle readers to young adults (YA) hooked. Wait. And gaming. Read him and you’ll know how important it is to his writing. He has the “Superlative Super Sleuths” series under his belt, featuring the super awesome duo Rachita and Aarti who solve cases involving candy bandits and careless aliens. The series is going to have author book by the year-end.
Archit says he started writing when he was 14 or 15, mainly to vent out the teenage angst that most kids have at that age. “It was mostly emo stuff and really terrible humor that I never dared to share with even those closet to me. Reading, strangely, didn’t inspire me to write. I recollect me and my likeminded friends pillaging through the horrible jokes section of books in the library, while our peers were busy either reading more serious stuff or doing other things that the popular kids did,” he says.
But once he was in his 20s and slightly more confident about himself, he shared a couple short stories with a few close friends, one of whom suggested he do a writing workshop with the publishing house Duckbill. He attended it on a whim, and ended up really enjoying it. The rest, as they say, is history. Or rather mystery, since Duckbill went on to publish the “Superlative Super Sleuths” series.
Writing like Archit Taneja
Archit has some great tips for young writers and he dishes them out in his trademark style:
- Do not be discouraged if you feel your writing style doesn’t stand out or if you don’t have a fancy vocabulary. That is just one aspect to writing, and you can still tell a good story if you excel in other areas.
- When it comes to writing, you should embrace you weird. What makes you unique is probably what will reflect the best when written down.
- Children’s/YA books by Indian authors are still far from the limelight. Books by foreign authors still dominate Indian readers. We are still waiting for an Indian author who changes the landscape in this genre. You could be that author!
- Writing something can require a lot of labour. There would generally be a driving force that makes you want to continue working on the project. It could be something that inspires you, something that you really enjoy and want to put into words. It’s possible that the driving force dies mid-way and you don’t feel like finishing the thing. For example, if you’re a massive fan of a television show, and the new director ruins the show by messing up the plot or changing the character’s personalities in the next season, you obviously don’t relate to the show anymore, and just hearing its name makes you cringe. At such a critical juncture, you should remind yourself that your fan fiction is its own entity now, and it is independent of external events, so you should not stop. Also, you’ve spent so much time on it already, it would be just stupid to stop now. This example can be extrapolated to other scenarios.
The writer’s routine
Archit says he is not sure if he has a consistent writing style. “If I’m feeling profound, which happens if I have just read or watched something profound, or stayed up beyond 2 a.m., I try to write more descriptively. Otherwise, I just end up telling the story in simple words. In whatever style I write, I attempt to achieve goofy or quirky humour, with possibly a scientific/technological bent to it,” he reveals.
Archit mostly ends up writing on weekends. “If I think of something interesting on a weekday, I end up taking notes on my phone to expand on them during the weekend. The writing happens in one- or two-hour bursts, interleaved with unhealthy food snacking and random video-watching on the phone. A lot of web browser tabs are opened to search on topics,” he says.
Bet you didn’t know that Archit is obsessed with the cartoon “Adventure Time”. At one point, he was the No. 1-ranked player in India in the “Adventure Time” section of a popular quiz app.
Picture Credit : Google