There are many ways to go about writing one’s first novel, and here I would like to share how I went about writing mine.

When I started writing it, I had likely read over a thousand novels in both English and Urdu, in all kinds of genres, and knew, or thought I knew, what a novel was all about. More importantly, I had a clear sense of the kind of novel I enjoyed reading, and the kind I did not.

Most of the time, one can sense a good story from the first page, very much like one can sense a good movie from the opening shot or scene, and the music. There’s no formula to developing this sense; one just acquires it after wading through thousands of good and bad stories, and watching many, many movies.

I also had the material and setting for my novel: the sedate life in Hyderabad, Sindh, which would be a fertile setting for the story. It would explore the philosophical concept of eternity, pay homage to the life of neighbourhood cats, and to my nana [maternal grandfather], who was a most colourful character and had a collection of prized pigeons that were coveted, among others, by the Bholoo brothers. It would also draw on my father’s earnest efforts and ultimate failure to write a book that he had named The Boundaries of Human Reason, his struggles against the termites which attacked his shelves after every monsoon, and his typist, whose shiny bicycle I wished to steal. That Hyderabad had a mental asylum, had also to be acknowledged, somehow.

Despite these strong advantages, I had one glaring impediment: except for a few fairy tales, I had never written a novel, and had no idea how to connect all of these elements together. In other words, there was no plot and, if anything could be more beautiful, I had no bloody idea that there was none. I was just too besotted with the elements of the story to think about it. After all, what was the use of reading over a thousand novels if one could not start writing one when one wished?

When I sat down to write, I tried to knead the elements into a story, but never got beyond the first few paras. Things did not connect. No combination of descriptions made any sense. My so-called ability to discern good stories from bad ones was no help, as I could not put any story on the page. The sense of failure was complete.

Now, I no longer care about it but, at that time, my setting myself a daily writing target saved me. I forced myself to write 200 words of the story, while I figured out how to tell the story itself. As the story had proved elusive, I wrote about the elements of the story: eternity, the cats, my nana, the termites, the typist, the madhouse. In other words, at the daily rate of 200 words, I began sketching the characters and elements in the story. Progress was marked on a calendar. When I fell short, I made up for the word count in the same week or month.

After a while, I ran out of things to write about. But, by then, I had written some 20-odd sketches, some detailed, some of a rudimentary nature, and all of a very questionable quality. But for the first time, I was beginning to feel a sense of progress.

This was because all these characters or elements belonged to the same worlds, both the physical world, and the world of the story, which I had unsuccessfully tried to capture earlier. And all of them had pre-existing connections with each other, if not in actual fact, then in the nebulous way I imagined them connected in the story. Making scenes suddenly became possible. If my nana’s pigeons were sunning themselves, the famous neighbourhood tom could be watching them with murderous plans. Adding to that a line or two about the legendary tom who could open refrigerators and drink milk from a cup by raising it to his mouth would give the scene a nice literary touch!

It was at this time that termites took centre-stage, and became the plot. I started joining the characters together through criss-crossing their lives as described in the sketches. A few sketches that could not fit this exercise were discarded. During this second stage, or second draft of the narrative, it occurred to me that the termites could touch most characters in the narrative. From that point, I had two choices: keep the termites confined to the house where the story originated, or infest the whole city with them.

I asked myself: how would my hero, Italo Calvino, have dealt with the situation? Unfortunately, in Calvino’s short story Argentine Ant, the ant infestation is limited to a single house. Then I asked myself what my other hero, Muhammad Khalid Akhtar, would have done. And the answer was clear. Muhammad Khalid Akhtar would have spread the termites throughout the city. That, then, became the big plot, under which many smaller plots unfolded.

With the city being infested with termites, all kinds of possibilities opened up. Human beings, as we all know, are a mad species. We shine best in times of pestilence, pandemics and contagions. A termite infestation would bring out the best in a small city society.

To make sure that I captured all possible varieties of madness, I read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, which was very entertaining, and Albert Camus’ The Plague, which was dull like all of Camus’ works. I read two books on termites and their habits, available in the local library, and re-read Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, which offers a fascinating study into the actions of the organism called the human crowd.

But the most rewarding read during this research was The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals by E.P. Evans which, along with many astonishing historical cases, documents how a priest exorcised a giant colony of termites!

[To be continued]

The columnist is a novelist, author and translator.

He can be reached via his website: micromaf.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 15th, 2026