The Night My Characters Spoke to Me
Kalimpong: Part 2
I’m back with my update on Kalimpong. A novel that came to me as a commissioned idea from my beloved publisher… and I can’t wait to share what has come of it. My last update was a couple of weeks ago, where I shared about how the outline of the novel involved the talking clouds, fog, mist, storm, and dew… and today, I’m halfway through my first draft, 30,000 words strong.
While writing this piece, I kept asking—what keeps an author going? What has kept me going for so long with the clouds and Kalimpong?
This morning when I woke up, my mind refused to believe where I was. It was still recovering from the surreal dream of the previous night. After 30,000 words into the first draft of the novel, finally, last night was when my characters came into my dream. I’m a strong believer in magic. I believe characters weave magic—they hold the ability to take a story forward, make something special out of the mundane and ordinary. All this while, I had been pushing myself to write 1,500 words daily—sketching characters, vivid visualisations, and holding onto a faint idea—letting nature, clouds, characters unfold their story that I have dared to write. After that tough start and through the uncertainty… I would ask if this piece of my new manuscript would amount to anything.
In the last few weeks, these thoughts have persisted in tiny pockets. And then… after days of doubt, I had my moment last night when a dream was all that it took to make it real. Today, with two parts of the novel down—The Mist and The Storm—I’m more excited than ever. My characters have now started talking to me. That’s the process of writing that has worked for me for so long, my dreams are my muse!
Sometimes this relief evades me, playing its quiet game… like sunlight lost behind clouds or leaves, then sunrays reappearing… seeping through them like tiny diamonds again. I’ve started convincing myself that doubts and relief will be inevitable parts of my writing journey. However, this novel has made me realise a pattern—the rise and fall of doubts and relief—like the sharp outline of the hills. And in that rhythm of rise and fall, doubts and relief… the sun, the leaves, the clouds guide me to the climax that I have a misty idea about, I keep writing in my practiced pockets of 1,500 daily words.
Some days are smooth, others challenging. My daughter doesn’t like her hair tied up, my son wants a Belgian waffle right now, my nanny falls sick, my morning toast is burnt—life happens. But the show must go on, the dreams must keep coming, the first draft must be completed. Because… unless I have the first draft, how would I ever edit… unless my dreams keep coming, how would I ever face my characters for abandoning them?
The day I write my last update of this series… of having submitted my manuscript, I would thank this dream from last night for almost singlehandedly taking me to the finishing line. I do look forward to coming here and sharing my updates again in a couple of weeks. By that time, the haziness of the fog and the mist would have cleared. If I can make it to 50,000 words by the end of my first draft, I would for certain do my happy dance—forgetting about all the storms in between, embracing the clarity of the dew. Until then, I’d hold on to my dream, my muse.
Debalina Haldar is an alumna of IIM Lucknow, class of 2015. She started writing when she was seven years old. She writes in the literary fiction genre. Her novel, The Female Ward, was published in October 2012, by Thames River Press (UK). Her second book, Wrinkles in Memory, is a collection of 22 short stories. It was published in August 2016 by Lifi Publications. Wrinkles in Memory was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar for books in English in 2020 . Her novel, The Daughters of Shantiniketan, was published in August 2025 by Readomania Publishing. She is based in Bengaluru where she lives with her husband and her two children.
Get The Daughters of Shantiniketan here
Comments