Say hello to Sharath Komarraju, software engineer by qualification and now full time author! How do you decide if you can switch careers and what should aspiring authors do? Here is an excellent piece by Sharath, answering these questions:
I am and have always been, a strong introvert. I have always been academically strong though my best friends have always been the backbenchers, the so-called ‘average students’. In college I became a keen sportsman, playing badminton, tennis, cricket and squash regularly. For the first two years of college, I was shy to talk to women, whom I was meeting for the first time because I went to all boys’ schools throughout.
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I have not always been into writing. At school, my only brush with writing was winning the odd essay competition. I used to be a good English student, though and used to read a lot. During these years, it never occurred to me that books had to be written by people. For all I knew and cared, they were magical things that just appeared out of nowhere on book racks and in libraries.
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When I was twenty-two, I had just finished my degree and was on the lookout for a creative hobby. Since I had a laptop with MS Word installed on it, I thought writing would be a nice choice.
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The inspiration for a writer comes from stuff that he reads, especially stuff that is way better than what he’s producing at the moment. Sometimes, when he reads something that is (in his opinion) bad, that also serves as inspiration, because he says to himself: I can do the same thing, but only better. And he gets to work.
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When I worked full-time, I had two hours of writing time carved out of my schedule every day. I would write every chance I got. Sometimes I wrote on the way to work, sometimes I wrote during the lunch or coffee breaks. Sometimes, on slow days at the office, I would lock myself up in a meeting room and write for an hour or so.
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To write full time was a simple decision. For about six years I worked in a software firm and wrote part time. The moment it became clear to me that I could earn as much money through writing as I was at the time through my ‘real’ job, I quit. It has been nearly two years now, and it’s going well so far. (Fingers crossed).
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My advice to anyone looking forward to having a book published is to finish the book first. And write as many books as you need to publish one.
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