Tenth-grader gears up to publish second novel

CHENNAI: It’s one thing for a 13-year-old to be good at something. But it’s completely prodigious for a person that age to be good at nearly everything she does. Sixteen-year-old Shivani Nath, who began writing her first novel at the age of 13, belongs to the second category of teenagers. “I was always a bright student,” she says without a hint of hesitation. “I would also go out in the evenings to play.” For someone who seemed to have the time to do everything, Shivani achieved quite a feat by managing to finish writing her book, My Final Abode, within a year. She remembers, “When I was a little girl, I would hide a book in my desk in class and write about things that were going on in my head.” But the fun school activity was short-lived. “But that was only until my teacher caught me,” she says. Ever since, she realised her knack for writing and began putting words together more regularly on her home computer. She wrote the prologue and first three chapters of My Final Abode. That was when her parents and uncle thought she was working on something good, and there was no stopping her.“So, when I started writing, it was difficult to stop and you know, one thing leads to another,” Shivani states. “Most of it was imagination; my mind is a very dramatic place.”When she finished the book, she admits that she felt her thoughts were ‘primitive’ and vocabulary ;poorer’. “I went back and edited a lot of parts. I wasn’t satisfied with the first draft,” she says. And like all famous authors have always been telling us, Shivani has also put a little bit of herself into the book. “In many parts, I tried to put a wee bit of myself in the protagonist -  some of the blunders I make and some of the emotions I go through,” she says and adds, “It wasn’t intended, it happened anyway.” Even as she is preparing for her ongoing board exams, Shivani can’t stop thinking about her next book. The Necromancer, she reveals, is the story of a boy who is picked up by a band of gypsies. “His gypsy mother makes a prophesy and he has two choices – either to leave all of them to pursue his love or stay with them and receive fame and all other comforts of life, except love,” she explains with apparent enthusiasm.