What is it like to be a writer?

In preparation for the long Independence Day weekend, I ordered three books from Flipkart last Sunday, three books that I think I'm going to absolutely love reading: Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology Of Humor Writing From The New Yorker, by David Remnick and Henry Finder; Hitch-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens; and The Big Bookshelf: Sunil Sethi In Conversation With 30 Famous Authors by Sunil Sethi.

The Big Bookshelf and Hitch-22 arrived by courier three days ago. The first book I opened was The Big Bookshelf and Sethi's introduction itself — alone worth the price of the book — offered these fascinating insights into the world of some of the world's best-known writers:

The Bengali writer and social activist Mahasweta Devi felt the urgency to explore the oral legends surrounding the life of the Rani of Jhansi for her first book, a biography of the warrior-queen, with such intensity that "I borrowed money from relatives, got into a train, left behind a small baby with his father and went to Jhansi".

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Whatever the motivation or their chosen route to writing, most authors professed an abiding passion for books from childhood. Reaching across to tap my knee, the novelist Nadine Gordimer, whose early education was patchy, admonished: "Reading, my dear, is the only training for a writer from a young age. You only become a writer by being a compulsive reader."

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Asked what his advice to a young writer would be, the American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux offered a tip: "Go away. Yes. Leave home, leave your parents and leave all the comforting things that hold you back... because if you stay... people will ask you what you are doing — what you are writing, what you are publishing. They ask you questions that you can't answer."

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Here is the best-selling thriller writer Jeffrey Archer's regime that he briskly rapped out: "I write up to seventeen drafts. I get away for two months and I wake up at 5.30 in the morning. I write from six to eight and take a two-hour break, I write from ten until twelve and take a two-hour break, I again write from two until four, followed by another two-hour break, then I write from six until eight, light supper, go to bed at 9.30 or 10 and begin again at 5.30 the next day. Fifty days of that in a row."

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The novelist Upamanyu Chatterjee, who leads a double life as a senior civil servant, sets himself a certain number of words a day, or how to resolve an idea or a problem in the plot, as a daily target. He writes every morning before leaving for office.

Returning home in the evening, "I sit down and peg away. Sometimes I achieve that target just before I go to bed."

Chatterjee takes about five years to complete a novel but there are others who take longer. It took Kiran Desai nearly seven years of a sequestered life to finish The Inheritance of Loss.

A more extreme example is that of the British-Pakistani fiction writer Nadeem Aslam who took more than eleven years to complete his prize-winning novel, Maps for Lovers.

Aslam grew up in a small town in Pakistan, attending an Urdu-medium school till the age of fourteen, when his family was forced to migrate to Britain to escape political persecution. "When I arrived in England my English was, 'This is a cat,'... My life was broken in half."

Instead of going to college, for many years he eked out a meagre living, working on building sites and in bars so that he could read in libraries. He would retreat into a private world to be able to write. "There were times when I draped the windows with black cloth. There was no phone, no TV, no radio, no newspapers and I just filled up the freezer with food and didn't leave the house for two and a half months."

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IT'S RAINING BOOKS

You know how one thing leads to another.

Here I was, having lunch at the college yesterday and checking the "Writing Tools" blog on Poynter. I saw a reference to the new New York Times beta site, where a grammar link popped up. On the grammar site I saw a reference to some grammar blogs; one, especially, stood out and I noticed a little feature on a book, The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself).

As I have noted, one thing led to another — the book is now being shipped to me by Flipkart. Make that book No. 4 ordered on Flipkart in five days.

Want to know more about The Subversive Copy Editor? Go here.