The plan was never to write a book. The plan was to get the laptop.
I was 11, I had dreamt up an entire fantasy world one night — vivid enough that I woke up and had to get it down — and I'd shown the scribbles to my friends and they liked them. That should have been the whole story. A kid, a notebook, a few pages, done.
But I'd also figured out that "I'm writing a novel" is the single most unassailable thing an 11-year-old can say to his parents. You can't argue with it. You can't tell a child to stop writing a book. And a serious young author, obviously, needs a serious machine.
The scheme
So I told them I needed a laptop to type my novel. A good one. My parents were, and I say this with love, extremely gullible. I was eleven and completely shameless. The laptop arrived, and with it, my real career: about a hundred games I could now finally run.
For the next three years I played video games full-time under the cover story of being a young novelist. The trick to any long con is that you have to keep it just alive — so every so often, when the alibi felt thin, I'd sit down and actually write. A scene here. A chapter there. Whatever I'd need to wave around if anyone asked to see progress.
And here's the part I did not see coming: three years of faking it added up to 30,000 words.
That was the moment the scam turned into a problem. I looked at the pile of fake-progress I'd accumulated and realized I might actually have a story in there. So I did the genuinely unthinkable thing — I started trying. I rewrote it, and rewrote it again, dragging it from a heap of stalling-tactics into something a stranger could read start to finish. Suddenly I was emailing publishers and arguing with myself about cover fonts.
The part that still doesn't feel real
Holding the first printed copy — my name on the cover of an actual object that existed in the world — is a specific kind of high I've been chasing ever since.
And then it did something I really didn't engineer. By 15 I'd tracked down a local distributor and re-released it cheaper for an Indian audience, and that's when it took off. Not the writing — the distribution. Schools started inviting me to give speeches and do signings, and a couple of local papers ran the obligatory "teenage author" piece. Most of that has long since fallen off the searchable internet — but the book itself is still out there, and a stranger even reviewed it that November, which is the only reason I get to tell you any of this without you having to take my word for it.
It got genuinely silly:
- I handed the bestselling author Chetan Bhagat a signed copy of my book at a literature festival — and he signed me back a copy of Five Point Someone, the novel that became 3 Idiots. A fair trade, in my head.
- Kids at signings ran out of paper and had me sign their hands and backpacks with their own pens.
- For a stretch there, basically every high schooler in Bangalore knew who I was.
- A decade later, a total stranger tracked me down online just to tell me I'd been their favorite author growing up. I think about that one more than any of the rest.
Now the honest part, because false modesty is just bragging in a trench coat:
"It still reads like it was written by a 14-year-old. Nowhere near Eragon."— my own verdict
I also, extremely on brand, lost the publisher account years ago to a forgotten email and password. So any royalties from anyone buying it today go into a void instead of to me. Please don't go read it. I mean it as a favor to us both.
The lesson I didn't sit down to learn
Here's the thing I actually think about, and the reason I still can't stop starting creative projects:
"If I had just *decided* to write a book, I never would have finished it. But because I had to fake progress, I accidentally built a real habit. It makes me wonder how much you could finish if you just tricked yourself into starting."— the whole point, really
I did not have the discipline to write a novel at 11. Almost no one does; that's not a character flaw, that's just being 11. What I had was a dumb, self-interested reason to sit at a desk every single day and put something down. The habit did the rest while I was looking the other way, thinking about the next game.
Notice which part was hard. Deciding to write a book is easy — I "decided" a hundred times. Starting, every day, when starting is boring and there's a game right there — that's the whole game. The scheme just quietly handled the starting for me, and the finishing came free once the habit existed.
That's the engine under everything I've built since. I've since dressed it up into a proper 30-day method, with the lying-to-my-parents module swapped for slightly more respectable scaffolding — but it is the exact same trick. Lower the bar to start until starting is trivial, show up daily, and let the habit become the thing you were too intimidated to attempt on purpose.
And the con had one more payload I never noticed being installed. The book was the alibi; the games were the real prize. But the worldbuilding — the thing I only did to keep the lie plausible — that bug never left. I've been building worlds ever since, and I run one at a D&D table now, watching real people live inside a place I made up to trick my parents. It started as a scheme to play video games. It's turned into one of the truest things about me.
Keep going The games that were the real obsession · How I trick myself into starting