Author of romance trilogy on her creative process, and switching genres

Andaleeb Wajid

Forty books later, Bengaluru-based author Andaleeb Wajid has decided to tell more love stories. "I like oscillating between genres - I even wrote horror a few years ago - but I knew I wanted to write a full-fledged romance novel." Prolific as she is, she has ended up writing not just one, but three books as part of the just-released Jasmine Villa series. The books follow three sisters and their romantic journeys, and are titled One Way to Love, Loving You Twice, and Three Times Lucky. "Each book takes one character's life and expands on it; these are inter-connected modern love stories," says Wajid, over a video call.

The 45-year-old writer lives with her two sons Saboor and Azhaan, aged 20 and 16, and usually spends her mornings writing her multiple books. The last two years have been hard on Wajid - she lost both her husband and mother-in-law to COVID in 2021, during the second wave of the pandemic. "There was a time I was tweeting about my husband, and all that happened afterwards. I felt like I needed to put it out there, not for anyone else to see, but for myself." What came across was Wajid's love story, sometimes in a picture shared, or just thoughts. That her love series is out for readers and fans to pick up, seems almost cathartic. Giving heft to Meryl Streep's famous line of "take your broken heart, and make it into art", Wajid says she used writing as therapy. "I had been writing even when both of them were in the hospital, and I felt like all our/my plans had come undone suddenly. My brother just told me ‘do what makes you feel better'. And so I wrote." Support also poured in on social media. Wajid says that the best part of being online has been that people know her already. "But it also means they assume they know more about me than what I show. So now, I use it only for work. My rants go into stories that only my close friends lists can see."

Ask her if it has been hard being a female Muslim author, and write about romance, especially when it comes to penning down intimate scenes, and she takes a different tack. "I wrote this saga kind of novel called More Than Just Biryani, which was about two female friends and food, and lots of people loved it. When the Jasmine Villa series released, there were some comments that pointed to the fact that they were surprised these novels were written by the same person who wrote that book," she says, adding that the real challenge was in fine-tuning her craft. "I didn't want to write an intimate scene which seemed badly written or just unpalatable. I wanted to write scenes that didn't seemed forced, and were natural."

For now, she is writing more books - self-publishing one, with another YA novel to be released by the end of the year. Do we see a 50-book milestone coming up soon? With Wajid, it may just happen sooner than we think.

Talking books and writing with Andaleeb

What's your writing process?
I like writing early in the morning. Earlier on, when my children were younger, I had trained myself to write any time, regardless of how noisy it was. But these days, I like the quiet - I can't write with any noise, or any music. I write early in the morning before my sons get up. I also like to work chapter-wise. So I tell myself, today I will finish one chapter, and then another the next day, and that's how I move forward.

What's a book you keep going back to for comfort?
I enjoy romance, but I also like crime and horror. There is this duo - Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. They have written 20 books, and I love their Special Agent Pendergast series, especially the second book called Reliquary. It's set in a New York museum, and it's about monsters in the basement, just the kind of stuff I like. It's a book I keep going back to.

What's a motivational book that has helped you?
I like to read good fiction that doesn't make me insecure, because of course, I can't ever write like that. But I do like reading Anne Lamott's Bird After Bird, not because of the writing, but because of the way she puts things together. It's a book
for writers.

What's a book you will recommend to a person who have never read romance?
Jasmine Villa, definitely. It's very filmy and melodramatic - it has a feel-good factor.