When I was 11, I had a dream so vivid I had to write it down. I showed the scribbles to my friends, they liked them, so I wrote a little more. That genuinely should have been the end of it.
Except I was a mischievous kid, and I had a genius idea.
The scheme
I told my parents I needed a gaming laptop — to "type my book," obviously. They were gullible. I was eleven and shameless. The laptop arrived, and so did my gaming career.
For the next three years, I played video games under the cover of being a young novelist. Every so often, to keep the lie alive, I'd actually write a bit. A scene here, a chapter there, whatever it took to have something to show if anyone asked.
And somehow, three years of faking it turned into 30,000 words.
That was the moment it stopped being a scam and became a problem — because I looked at what I'd accumulated and realized I might actually have a story. So I did the unthinkable: I started trying. I rewrote the whole thing, again and again, until it was a real, legible, cohesive book. Suddenly I was talking to publishers, picking fonts, choosing a cover.
The part that still feels unreal
Holding the first printed copy with my own name on the cover was surreal in a way I've chased ever since. By 15 I'd found a local distributor and republished it cheaper for an Indian audience, which is when it actually took off — schools inviting me to give speeches and do signings, newspapers running articles on the teenage author.
It got pretty silly:
- I gave the bestselling author Chetan Bhagat a signed copy of my book when I met him at a literature festival — and he signed me a copy of Five Point Someone, the novel that became the film 3 Idiots, right back.
- Kids at signings ran out of paper and had me sign their hands and backpacks with their own pens.
- For a while there, basically every high schooler in Bangalore knew who I was.
- A decade later, a stranger found me on Instagram to tell me I'd been their favorite author growing up.
I'll be honest about the book itself, because false modesty is just bragging in a trench coat:
"It still reads like it was written by a 14 year old — nowhere in the realm of those like Eragon."— my own verdict
I also, very on-brand, lost the publisher account years ago to a forgotten email and password, so any royalties from people buying it today go to a void instead of me. Don't actually go read it.
The lesson I didn't mean to learn
Here's the thing I think about constantly, and the reason I still chase creative projects today:
"If I had just decided to write a book, I probably wouldn't have finished it. But because I had to fake progress, I accidentally built a real habit. It makes me wonder — how many things could we actually finish if we just tricked ourselves into starting?"— the whole point, really
I didn't have the discipline to write a novel at 11. Almost no one does. What I had was a dumb excuse to sit at a desk every day and put something down — and the habit did the rest while I wasn't looking. The deciding wasn't the hard part. The starting was. The scheme just handled the starting for me.
It's the same trick under everything I've built since: I've turned it into a 30-day method now, with the lying-to-my-parents part swapped out for slightly more respectable scaffolding. But the engine is identical. Lower the bar to start until starting is trivial, show up daily, and let the habit quietly become the thing you were too intimidated to attempt head-on.
I've been building worlds ever since. It started as an excuse to play Far Cry. It became one of the coolest things I've ever done.